Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [13]
Some of the most interesting giving is being done by young people. Two Minnesota sixth graders, Rachel Floeder and Audrey Feltz, established the Kids to the Rescue Fund, set up through the Salvation Army, to help children affected by Hurricane Katrina. Their goal was to collect $1 from as many of their contemporaries as possible and to challenge kids across America to follow their example. When I was in Minneapolis in 2006, I met the student leaders of Kids to the Rescue. They had raised $24,000 for victims of Katrina.
In September 2005, Hillary worked with Commerce Bank and Future Tech Enterprise, Inc., to set up a similar effort by New York schoolchildren called Coins from Kids. In just four months, children from more than forty school districts had given $31,510.47 to Katrina recovery efforts.
There is another way young people can give money that I really like: selling a product or service for a good cause. This kind of giving goes on all over America every day. Kids’ lemonade stands, student car washes, and old-fashioned pie suppers in small communities: all raise funds for worthy local projects. When I was in politics in Arkansas, one mandatory annual appearance for every politician in the state was the Gillett Coon Supper, which always drew 1,500 or more people to a town of eight hundred in the rice country of southeast Arkansas. The local high school always fielded a good football team, but it was too small to afford one, so the budget gap was filled when a crowd twice as large as the total population actually paid good money to eat barbecued raccoon! It’s an experience everyone ought to have once in a lifetime—as long as there’s plenty of barbecue sauce to help make the coon meat edible.
I recently came across a particularly compelling example of this kind of giving. Eli Winkelman, a student at Scripps College in Southern California, organized her own NGO, Challah for Hunger. Every week Challah for Hunger volunteers produce more than 150 loaves of challah, the braided bread Jews traditionally break at the beginning of the Sabbath meal or during religious services. Each Friday morning, the students sell the bread to their fellow students, on tables that also have information on the hunger crisis in Darfur, “Stop Genocide in Sudan” T-shirts, “Save Darfur” bracelets, and letter-writing and advocacy materials. Students who use the materials for “Acts of Advocacy” get a discount on their challah purchases. Every week Challah for Hunger sends at least $300 to Darfur relief efforts and generates fifty letters and postcards advocating more assistance to the refugees or more serious coverage of the crisis by the media. Since November 2004, Challah for Hunger has sent more than $20,000 from students at Scripps and the other colleges in the Claremont group.
I find this effort particularly touching and relevant because it was started by a Jewish student, and is funded by the sales of traditional Jewish bread for the benefit of poor Muslims whose plight has been ignored for too long by Muslim nations much closer to them. Eli says she got the idea for Challah for Hunger “almost by accident. I baked bread because people liked it. But I realized it was a gift to have the time and money to do it, and the only way to honor the way I’ve been blessed was to do something worthy.” Eli graduated from Scripps in the spring of 2007, but others will continue the work there, and she is hoping to see it expanded to other college campuses. There