Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [59]
In 2005, the girls set a goal of raising $5,000. The publicity and enthusiasm their efforts inspired enabled them to surpass the goal by $145,000, and by May 2007 they had raised a total of $800,000. The feeding program grew to 350 children a day. Eleven teenage H.O.P.E. members traveled to Langkloof to meet with tribal elders and community members, work with the children, renovate a preschool, install a playground, and plant fruit trees and a vegetable garden to provide produce to feed the children.
H.O.P.E. has now expanded to include children from other schools. It is going to construct a community center with running water, flush toilets, and a modern kitchen, build a chicken coop to provide chickens and eggs for the feeding program, develop a working farm with an irrigation system to employ 125 members of the local community, and continue the yearly trips so that H.O.P.E. members can promote education, AIDS prevention, and inspire children to break the cycle of poverty and disease. To achieve these goals, the kids have to raise $300,000. After that, they intend to start adult education classes, scholarships and financial aid for good students, medical services—and to replicate their project in nearby communities. I wouldn’t bet against their success.
Could H.O.P.E. provide a model for young people in every community to start their own group to help other kids at home as well as in other countries? Why not? Think of all the exciting things that creative teenagers could do if every high school had its own NGO.
NINE
Giving to Good Ideas
THE WORLD IS full of people with innovative ideas who are willing to give their all to implementing them but don’t have money to get started. These “social entrepreneurs” can change the lives of millions of people for the better if only they are helped to follow through on their ideas.
The movement to identify and fund social entrepreneurs in a systematic way, indeed the very term “social entrepreneurship,” was the brainchild of one man. Like many of the world’s greatest givers, Bill Drayton is not well known outside the global NGO community. But to those who believe in the power of private citizens to improve society, Drayton is a hero. After graduating from Harvard College and Yale Law School and studying economics at Oxford, he worked in management consulting at McKinsey & Company for ten years, then at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Carter administration. At the EPA, Drayton pioneered the notion that business had to be made a partner in protecting the environment through market-based incentives like emissions trading and replacing regulations that micromanage business decisions with overall pollution targets that let businesses determine the most cost-effective way of meeting them. In 1980, he founded an organization to promote social and economic innovation and called it Ashoka, after the third-century B.C. Indian emperor who unified most of South Asia with his humane, progressive policies. In Sanskrit, “ashoka” means the “active absence of sorrow.” The organization’s logo is the oak tree—a symbol of strength and health—which, as we all know, grows from a tiny acorn.
For years Drayton had been talking to friends and colleagues and traveling the world trying to determine whether it was possible to identify powerful new ideas for systematic change and excellent social entrepreneurs capable of implementing them before the viability of the idea or the entrepreneur had been proven. He became convinced that it could be done and that he should spend his life doing it. Ashoka began its operations in India with just $50,000 of his own money and money he raised from friends.
One of the first Ashoka