Youth Forum on Global Poverty

Today I ditched work and volunteered my time as a facilitator for the World Affairs Council Youth Forum on Global Poverty. Two hundred high school youth came to learn more why poverty exists, what are contributing factors, and what they can do to help. One of the speakers began her speech with a short anectdote:

A grandfather is watching his young grandson, who is currently bored and anxious. To entertain him for a bit, the grandfather takes a picture of the world in a newspaper, tears it into pieces and tells him to put it together and bring it back to him when he's done. The boy runs off with his puzzle and comes right back. The grandfather asks, "That was supposed to keep you busy for a while. How'd you finish so fast?" The little boy answered that there was a picture of a man on the other side, so when the man was put back together, he knew the world was in order.

The moral of the story, in case you missed it, was that this little boy had stumbled upon the secret to eliminating global poverty- you put a person back together- you give them an education, health, and a mean of existence- and the world will fall in to place. Yes, this is easier said than done. This blog isn't to tell you how all this can happen. This blog is to say how amazed I was by some of the youth.

One girl presenting raised over $100k after the tsunami hit SE Asia to rebuild 10 fishing villages- it only took $11k to rebuild each one. She then went to SE Asian to see her efforts at work. Some of the villages were not fixable, and so the money was redirected to more useful things. She did this at 16. What had you done by 16? By 20? By 25?

Some of the kids in my group were forced to come to this day-long forum. But others were in groups such as Youth Making a Difference or the Poverty Awareness Club (exact name escapes me at the mo'). I wasn't learning these things when I was younger and I have to admit that as cheesy as this sounds, it brought some hope to me to hear that so many young people are- if nothing else- aware of what's going on this world. They were appalled that so many people live on $1 a day; you should have seen the looks on their faces when I told them childhood mortality was 9 million annually; and you could hear the gasps in the crowd as one boy read off a statistic that Europe spends as much money in ICE CREAM annually as some governments spend the whole year.

I'm sure some kids didn't care. But others were ready to sign up for the peace corp or GCC or any other organization that would take them as volunteers. I don't expect any of you to do the same after reading my short recap blog, but I hope that hearing of such a successful 16 year old, you're inspired to make some sort of difference. Even if it's in the life of just one person. If a sixteen year old can do it, there's no reason we can't.

(And in case you're interested, here's a starting place... http://www.nothingbutnets.net/)