Posts with Category Where Am I Giving?

Human Rights Day at Indiana State

I bet you can’t name all 25 articles of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I bet you didn’t even know that there aren’t 25 articles, but 30. Ha! Got ya! I certainly couldn’t until I looked them up while researching WHERE AM I GIVING? 

75 years ago the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights drafted by a  committee of world leaders chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. The declaration consists of 30 articles of basic rights and fundamental freedoms. However “basic” and “fundamental” they may be, many people across the world and even in the United States are denied them.

Each year Indiana State hosts a day where speakers and students reflect and discuss human rights….

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Change Starts with a $6 Soccer Ball

The World Cup is underway, so I thought I would share a few soccer stories from around the world from my reporting involving the beautiful game.

In India, I got to spend time with Ashok Rathod, who founded the OSCAR Foundation. I wrote two chapters in my book Where Am I Giving? on my experiences in Ashok’s community. In the chapter below I meet Ashok and learn how he’s impacting his community through soccer.

If you like what you read, consider following OSCAR on Facebook and consider buying a copy of Where Am I Giving? for more stories of awesome givers like Ashok. 

Buy Where Am I Giving? at Bookshop / Indiebound / Barnes & Noble /Books-A-Million / Amazon

 

Chapter 16: Start With Your Local…

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Ugly Truth, Beautiful Game

(These ladies in Mumbai showed me how they played the beautiful game)

In Indiana, when I was a kid, we had wooden goal posts painted white. 

In Cambodia, the goals were orange cones.

In the Mosquito jungle of Honduras the goals were piles of fresh wood shavings–leftovers from crafting dugout canoes. 

In a slum in Mumbai, the goal was a puddle of water filled by a monsoon. 

In rural China, the goal was not to have to chase a ball down the terraced fields. 

Beautiful Game

While reporting around the world from some 60 countries, I’ve seen soccer/football played in almost all of them. Often the ball wasn’t a ball but a plastic…

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FTX, SBF, and EA: When a Do-Gooder Does Bad

One of effective altruism’s biggest givers, crypto-bro Sam Bankman-Fried (often referred to as SBF), may have built his billion-dollar empire on lies and under the cover of goodwill bought by his extreme giving. 

Ross Douthat of the New York Times referred to Bankman-Fried’s actions as “playing Robin Hood using proceeds from an over-leveraged Ponzi Scheme.” And he did so from his penthouse of pills and polyamory in the Bahamas. At least he had fun, but now the entire Effective Altruism (EA) movement is under fire. 

Just look at these headlines written after SBF’s fall:

Effective Altruism Committed the Sin It Was Supposed to Correct

Effective altruism solved all the…

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Election Day in Kenya

Today is election day in Kenya. Presidential elections are sometimes violent and chaotic in Kenya (in the United States, now, too). I was in Kenya for the 2017 elections and thought I’d share an excerpt from my book Where Am I Giving? about what that was like. 

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Mom thought we were being abducted. But it was worse than that.

Her flight landed in Nairobi at the absolute worst time of the last 10 years. After days of contention in the presidential race, the election commission had declared incumbent, Joseph Kenyatta the winner. Nairobi had essentially been closed since the election—stores were boarded up and the streets of a city with 3 million people were empty. The few times I had ventured out it felt…

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Good People: Kohl Crecelius on Good Business & Importance of Job

Kohl Crecelius believes that jobs matter almost more than anything. He has helped lead the modern movement integrating social good and business, as he founded Krochet Kids and KNOWN SUPPLY. Kohl joins Kelsey and Jay to discuss Fair Trade, B-Corps, and how his journey started with crocheting.

Show Notes:

Kohl’s B-crop business – KNOWN SUPPLY
Nonprofit Kohl started with high school buddies – Krochet Kids

What we discussed:
His path to social entrepreneurship
Importance of travel
Aid and cycle of dependency
Rana Plaza factory collapse
Cause washing
Decision to create a nonprofit vs. a cause-oriented for profit
B Corps
Benefit Corporations
Fair Trade
Article: Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting

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Good People: Interview with AP reporter Victoria Milko

Victoria Milko has reported from health clinics in rural Bangladesh, protests in the streets of Myanmar, and refugee camps in Thailand. She joins Kelsey & Jay from her apartment in Jakarta to discuss the global impact of COVID-19, the importance of journalism in today’s society, and her path to becoming a Southeast Asia-based science reporter for The Associated Press.

Show notes

Topics we talked about with Victoria:

– COVID-19 impact in developing countries
– Life in Jakarta during the global pandemic
– Reporting on genocide and mass graves
– Impact of reporting on traumatic events
– Family’s refugee history and impact on her career
– Dream of being a foreign correspondent and how she reached that dream
– Living and reporting in Myanmar
– Rise and fall of Aung San Suu Kyi
– Facebook’s impact…

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Is COVID-19 Our Alien Invasion

I love alien invasion movies. I love the cuts to scenes from around the world where we come together as a species regardless of race, religion, ideology, and nationality, to confront a common enemy. The poor Eiffel Tower, pyramids, Golden Gate Bridge, Sydney Opera House are the first to go. If you find yourself in an Alien Apocalypse movie, steer clear of major landmarks. But when they are shown exploding, they aren’t Egypt’s pyramids, or France’s Eiffel Tower, they are ours. Faced with human extinction, suddenly all that divides us fades away and what connects us is all that matters.

I’ve always felt like peace on earth was just one good alien invasion away. 

Is COVID-19 our common…

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Good People: The ripple effects of giving money

Give a man a fish? Teach a man to fish? But what if he doesn’t want to fish? Joe Huston, The CFO of Give Directly, joins Kelsey and Jay to discuss giving money to the poor and the positive ripple effects it makes in a community.

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Show notes: 

GiveDirectly.org
GiveWell’s report on Give Directly
How do cash transfers impact people who don’t receive them? (post and link to paper)
Review of evidence of direct cash transfers
Research Give Directly shares on site
Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America book by Linda Tirado…

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