We recently received some photos from Susie Krabacher, our 2006 Humanitarian
Award Honoree, who founded The Mercy and Sharing Foundation in Haiti. Before
the earthquake, Susie had a feeding program that was serving over 800,000 meals a
year. Much of this was destroyed by the quake, but the organization is now back up
and running in two locations.

This program provides thousands of children with a daily meal. The programs run
in rural areas where food and jobs are scarce. The plates typically consist of rice and
beans and meat. The children are always served first, and then whatever remains is
set aside for the elderly and the infirm.

Many children who come to these feeding centers are not in school. Those who are
lucky enough to afford a school uniform and go to class are given a recess to visit the
feeding center and receive what is often their only meal of the day. The scene at the
feeding centers is often a crowded one; since the number of children who come to
eat is greater than the number of benches available, many sit on the ground. After
the meal, the children return home or return to school.



We were so excited to get this photo update, and we are equally excited to share
this wonderful work with all of our wonderful supporters. To see more photos from
Susie, click here to view our gallery.

One of the major points of differentiation for the World of Children Award is its dedication to thoroughly vetting prospective Honorees before we elevate them to Honoree status and award them with a cash grant at our annual Award ceremony every November. Our vetting process is especially important in today’s world where there is so much potential for fraud and so much philanthropy that never appears to reach its intended goal. This makes donors skittish and rightfully so. The World of Children Award secures its position as “the gold standard in child advocacy” by employing a major international security firm to do on-site investigations and issue formal written reports on every prospective Honoree.

Over the course of 13 years we have uncovered over a dozen cases where prospective Honorees were not exactly who they said they were, in spite of what appeared to be excellent credentials and notable references. Consider a woman in Kenya who had references from the president of a university in the USA as well as a noted author and professor at another university. She claimed to have a program teaching children marketable computer skills so that they could become employable instead of living in poverty and on garbage dumps. She professed to have several locations with large computer rooms, teachers, and more. However, when our investigators arrived on the scene of two of the supposed locations, they found empty storefronts with no children, no computers and nothing but a name on the door. This woman had successfully extracted hundreds of thousands of dollars from unsuspecting Americans and Brits.

Since we want to be sure our recognition really goes to deserving people and since we want to be able to absolutely assure donors that their contributions are going where they want them to - to serve children – our intense and rigorous vetting process is not only necessary, but it is an inviolable part of our program. No other organization we know of uses this approach.

On January 12, 2010, the Caribbean nation of Haiti was devastated after the earth shook. The damage done by the quake is incomprehensible to most of us. The closest we can come to understanding the horrific repercussions of the quake are statistics (230,000 dead, 300,000 injured, 1,000,000 homeless), but statistics alone cannot properly convey the human element of Haiti. I believe that the best way to get a sense of what the nation of Haiti has gone through is to listen to their stories. Some of these stories were tragic, some dramatic, and some hopeful. I want to tell you the story of one little girl who was low on the priority list after Haiti’s horrific quake, but who World of Children was able to help.

2006 World of Children Award Winner Susie Krabacher was involved in Haiti long before the quake struck. She founded the Mercy and Sharing Foundation, a comprehensive program of orphanages, feeding centers and pediatric medical care which helps many needy children, several with disabilities. After the quake, Susie wrote to us about a little girl named Falee who had been injured. Falee’s right eye had been knocked out of its socket during the quake, and she was in danger of losing site in the eye and the eye itself if she did not receive medical attention soon. However, medical support in Haiti was strained because of the massive amount of injuries, and since Falee’s injury did not appear to be life-threatening, she was low on the list for medical attention. Our hearts immediately went out to Falee. What if she were our own child or granddaughter, suffering this extreme injury with no one to help her?

Over the last thirteen years World of Children has built a substantial, global network of award winners, many of them in the health-care field. We put out a call for help to many of our past award winners who were already working on the ground in Haiti.  Two of them responded, ready to help. One of them was Kathleen Magee of Operation Smile, who had a team aboard the USS Hope, a hospital ship anchored in the Port Au Prince Harbor. Kathleen intervened to ensure Falee’s timely surgery, and thankfully her eye and vision were saved.

We are grateful that we, together with our global network of past award winners, were able to help make Falee’s story, one of millions from Haiti, a hopeful one with a happy ending. We applaud the tenacious spirit of our past award winners as they are truly global heroes who are committed to improving not just statistics, but also improving the lives of individual children in need like Falee.

For the rest of the week, our 2008 Founder’s Youth Honoree and the Founder of RandomKid, Talia Leman, will be participating at Techonomy. The word “Techonomy” is a neologism (a combination of the words technology and economy). Techonomy’s participants are many of the world’s brightest minds from a variety of fields, including the world’s former richest man, founder of Microsoft and famed philanthropist Bill Gates. The intent of Techonomy is to use technology to revamp the world’s economic structure and to meet certain global challenges that humanity currently faces.

 

When you check out Techonomy, search for Talia and her organization RandomKid.  Talia was selected to participate because she has used technology to organize millions of youth to create an economy of change.   Talia and RandomKid have already linked together 12 million youth from 20 countries to bring aid on four continents.

 

At Techonomy, she is slated to unveil RandomKid’s new website.  I personally cannot wait to see this new site and what technological innovations it capitalizes on.  I am sure that the site will allow Talia and the rest of the RandomKid team to even more effectually organize youth with the intent of making a real, lasting change.

 

All of us at the World of Children are very proud of Talia and the impact she has already had in her young life.  To learn more about Techonomy, click here.  Also, look out for RandomKid’s website, which should be launched some time this week!

 

I will ashamedly admit that I have a penchant for bad television, and not long ago I was watching re-runs of “My Super Sweet 16,” a reality program on MTV that documents the birthdays of affluent teenagers (generally a sixteenth birthday, but sometimes a quinceañera or other coming-of-age celebration).  These parties often run upwards of $100,000 and are thrown in the honor of (clearly spoiled) adolescents who will demand anything from performances by Kanye West to helicopter rides to faux volcanoes to cars with six-figure price tags. The show is dripping with drama (one girl had a complete meltdown when her mother selected the wrong moment to give her a Lexus) and clearly aims to find the most excessive examples of, well, excess.

 

The absurdity of shows like “My Super Sweet 16” is self-evident, and most people likely have a sense of how shameless these parties are. However, the tragedy of extreme self-fulfillment is more easily missed, but can be brought in to focus when one considers how “the other half” lives. And I literally mean half; 50% of the world’s population lives below the internationally defined poverty line, meaning they live on less than $2.50 per day. Even worse, UNICEF states that 24,000 children die DAILY because of poverty. In light of those statistics, let’s revisit a $100,000 super sweet sixteen: the money spent on a single party for a single spoiled teenager could easily feed, house, clothe and educate more than 100 children for an ENTIRE YEAR.

 

Most of us will never spend $100,000 on a birthday party, but the truth is that the socioeconomic status of the average American is still much higher than that of the average person. I look at things I received on my own birthday last year (a coffee grinder, an ice cream cake, a check from my grandma) and if I were to add it up, it may not qualify as a super-sweet anything, but it would certainly be enough to make a real, lasting difference to a single child.

 

That is why World of Children created the Give Up Your Birthday website - to allow those of us who have had many luxuries in our lives to donate our birthdays to children who have had few luxuries and even insufficient necessities. If you would like to give your birthday to the world’s children who are in the most need, please visit http://www.giveupyourbirthday.org and sign up for a page. 100% of donations that come in through this website will go directly to trustworthy programs that dramatically improve the quality of life for children.  To learn more about Give Up Your Birthday and what we are doing, please visit this website.