Overseas volunteering has exploded in numbers and interest in the last couple of decades. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people travel from wealthier to poorer countries to participate in short-term volunteer programs focused on health services. Churches, universities, nonprofit service organizations, profit-making "voluntourism" companies, hospitals, and large corporations all sponsor brief missions. Hoping to Help is the first book to offer a comprehensive assessment of global health volunteering, based on research into how it currently operates, its benefits and drawbacks, and how it might be organized to contribute most effectively. Given the enormous human and economic investment in these activities, it is essential to know more about them and to understand the advantages and disadvantages for host communities. Most people assume that poor communities benefit from the goodwill and skills of the volunteers. Volunteer trips are widely advertised as a means to "give back" and "make a difference." In contrast, some claim that health volunteering is a new form of colonialism, designed to benefit the volunteers more than the host communities. Others focus on unethical practices and potential harm to the presumed "beneficiaries." Judith N. Lasker evaluates these opposing positions and relies on extensive research-interviews with host country staff members, sponsor organization leaders, and volunteers, a national survey of sponsors, and participant observation-to identify best and worst practices. She adds to the debate a focus on the benefits to the sponsoring organizations, benefits that can contribute to practices that are inconsistent with what host country staff identify as most likely to be useful for them and even with what may enhance the experience for volunteers. Hoping to Help illuminates the activities and goals of sponsoring organizations and compares dominant practices to the preferences of host country staff and to nine principles for most effective volunteer trips.

Your brakes fail and your car plunges from a pier into a February-frigid harbor. You are thrown to safety but your four-month old daughter, trapped in her car seat, drowns. Four years after that horror, you return from a trip to the shore and lift your four-month-old son from his carrier only to realize he's dead, too, a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Twenty-two years later, your 25-year old son drowns while swimming in a Malawi, Africa lake. How do you survive that first death, never mind the second, or the third? Ask Mags Riordan of County Kerry, Ireland. Only the blessing of her son Billy, the boy who later drowned, carried Mags through those first two deaths. Her reaction to Billy's loss caused Mags to do something beyond simple survival, though - it caused her to do something transformative, and remarkable. Returning to Malawi on the one-year anniversary of Billy's death, she saved the life of a local boy who would otherwise have died from a simple infection, and realized the desperate need for a medical clinic. With virtually no relevant experience, medical or otherwise, Mags founded a clinic that to date has saved and transformed the lives of tens of thousands of Malawians. If any of us wonders "What can one person do?" we need only look to Mags Riordan as a living, breathing example of someone who put aside her despair, and her comfort zone, in an effort to help and heal, proving the world truly can be changed, even by just two hands, and one single broken heart.

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides supplemental nutrition-rich foods and nutrition education (including breastfeeding promotion and support), as well as referrals to health care and social services, to low-income, nutritionally at-risk women, infants, and children up to five years old. Eligible women are specifically limited to those pregnant and post-partum (if breastfeeding, women are eligible for more benefits for a longer period of time). The WIC program seeks to improve the health status of its participants and prevent the occurrence of health problems during critical times of growth and development. This book provides an overview of the WIC program, including administration, funding, eligibility, benefits, benefits redemption, and cost containment policies. It also examines program trends, and discusses some of the major economic issues facing the program.

"A Daily Difference" demonstrates how easy it can be for "ordinary" people to make charitable giving part of their daily routine. This book contains dozens of real-life stories from people who have made small daily changes that have resulted in huge sums of money being raised for charities. The short stories in this book will appeal to people of all ages and walks of life. Zachmeier's writing style makes it easy to connect with the people in each story and empathize with their challenges. The innovative fundraising ideas and heart-warming outcomes summon a range of emotions to inspire readers to become more involved in helping others. The stories carry a common thread; those who take the time to make a difference are themselves blessed with abundance. The charitable efforts of two Make-A-Wish "wish kids" should inspire children everywhere to follow suit. "A Daily Difference" promotes a life-style you can adopt, enjoy, and pass on as a legacy to your children You don't have to be wealthy to make a difference - just willing.

Select students and teachers worked the room at a fundraising event for a New York City public high school Amy Brown calls College Preparatory Academy. It was their job to convince wealthy attendants that College Prep, with its largely minority and disadvantaged student body and its unusually high rate of graduation and college acceptance, was a worthy investment. To this end, students and teachers tried to seem needy and deserving, hoping to make supporters feel generous, important, and not threatened. How much, Brown asks, does competition for financing in urban public schools depend on marketing and perpetuating poverty in order to thrive? And are the actors in this drama deliberately playing up stereotypes of race and class? A Good Investment? offers a firsthand look behind the scenes of the philanthropic approach to funding public education-a process in which social change in education policy and practice is aligned with social entrepreneurship. The appearance of success, equity, or justice in education, Brown argues, might actually serve to maintain stark inequalities and inhibit democracy. Her book shows that models of corporate or philanthropic charity in education can in fact reinforce the race and class hierarchies that they purport to alleviate. As their voices reveal, the teachers and students on the receiving end of such a system can be critically conscious and ambivalent participants in a school's racialized marketing and image management. Timely and provocative, this nuanced work exposes the unintended consequences of an education marketplace where charity masquerades as justice.

If your organization is considering a capital, endowment, or other major fundraising campaign, Are You Ready for a Capital Campaign? by Linda Lysakowski will help you assess: * Whether you have a donor prospect pool for major campaign gifts. * Whether you have planned adequately for the campaign. * Whether your board is willing to step up to support the campaign. * Whether your staff has sufficient time to devote to the campaign. * Whether you have the right policies and procedures in place. * Whether your community is ready for the campaign. * How well your software system can manage a campaign. Written as a workbook, it's designed to walk you through, step by step, the process of assessing your nonprofit's ability to run a major fundraising campaign. It can be used in conjunction with the book Capital Campaigns: The Basics and Beyond, also by Linda Lysakowski. This workbook is part of the popular CharityChannel In the Trenches series. You'll know an In the Trenches books, workbooks and manuals not just by their covers, but by their authors' fun, upbeat writing style. But don't be fooled by their down-to-earth approach and ample use of sidebars. In the Trenches books are authoritative and cover what a beginner should know to get started and progress rapidly, and what a more experienced nonprofit-sector practitioner needs to move forward in the subject. Linda Lysakowski, a philanthropic consultant since 1993, is one of approximately one hundred professionals worldwide to hold the Advanced Certified Fund Raising Executive designation. She has managed capital campaigns, helped dozens of nonprofit organizations achieve their development goals, and trained more than twenty-five thousand professionals in all aspects of development throughout most of the United States, Mexico, Canada, Bermuda, and Egypt. She is the author of several books on fundraising.

Rebuilding Community after Katrina chronicles the innovative and ambitious partnership between Cornell University's City and Regional Planning department and ACORN Housing, an affiliate of what was the nation's largest low-income community organization. These unlikely allies came together to begin to rebuild devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The editors and contributors to this volume allow participants' voices to show how this partnership integrated careful, technical analysis with aggressive community outreach and organizing. With essays by activists, organizers, community members, and academics on the ground, Rebuilding Community after Katrina presents insights on the challenges involved in changing the way politicians and analysts imagined the future of New Orleans' Ninth Ward. What emerges from this complex drama are lessons about community planning, organizational relationships, and team building across multi-cultural lines. The accounts presented in Rebuilding Community after Katrina raise important and sensitive questions about the appropriate roles of outsiders in community-based planning processes.

In this richly revealing biography of a major, but little-known, American businessman and philanthropist, Peter M. Ascoli brings to life a portrait of Julius Rosenwald, the man and his work. The son of first-generation German Jewish immigrants, Julius Rosenwald, known to his friends as "JR," apprenticed for his uncles, who were major clothing manufacturers in New York City. It would be as a men's clothing salesperson that JR would make his fateful encounter with Sears, Roebuck and Company, which he eventually fashioned into the greatest mail order firm in the world. He also founded Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. And in the American South Rosenwald helped support the building of the more than 5,300 schools that bore his name. Yet the charitable fund he created during World War I went out of existence in 1948 at his expressed wish. Ascoli provides a fascinating account of Rosenwald's meteoric rise in American business, but he also portrays a man devoted to family and with a desire to help his community that led to a lifelong devotion to philanthropy. He tells about Rosenwald's important philanthropic activities, especially those connected with the Rosenwald schools and Booker T. Washington, and later through the Rosenwald Fund. Ascoli's account of Rosenwald is an inspiring story of hard work and success, and of giving back to the nation in which he prospered.

The Peace Corps/Honduras program has six primary projects: business development, child survival and HIV/AIDS prevention, water and sanitation, protected areas management, youth development, and municipal development. We collaborate with the government of Honduras, Honduran and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and communities throughout the country. Our program works in concert with the poverty-reduction strategy developed by Honduras and the international donor community. This type of integrated community development program makes Peace Corps/Honduras a traditional post in many ways. Community development and integrated rural development have been around conceptually for at least 40 years and were especially popular from the mid-1960s until about the late 1970s. We all have learned a lot since then about human capital, social capital, dependency and empowerment, and sustainability. We know that development takes a long time, with consistent work in an auspicious setting, which we do our best to provide through excellent site selection. Despite the traditional appearance, Peace Corps/Honduras' approach to, and work in, HIV/AIDS prevention, municipal development, business and information technology, protected areas management, and youth development put us very much in the vanguard of Peace Corps programming worldwide. Our objective as community development facilitators is not to teach the people of Honduras -American values but to help them help themselves within their own cultural framework.

IRS oversight of charitable organisations helps to ensure they abide by the purposes that justify their tax exemption and protects the sector from potential abuses and loss of confidence by the donor community. In recent years, reductions in IRS's budget have raised concerns about the adequacy of IRS oversight. This book describes the charitable organisation sector; describes IRS oversight activities; determines how IRS assesses its oversight efforts; and determines how IRS collaborates with state charity regulators and U.S. Attorneys to identify and prosecute organisations suspected of engaging in fraudulent (or other criminal) activity. This book also provides an overview of recent changes affecting tax-exempt and charitable organisations, while also discussing issues that may be of legislative interest in the future.

Finally, a comprehensive resource for Friends of the Library groups to use to design programming intended to invite ALL segments of the community into the library. Inside, you'll find information about advertising, overcoming obstacles, setting up a Teen Council, as well as 201+ "recipes" for programs, series, library exposure and fundraising. The ideas and plans presented can be scaled up, scaled down, or modified to suit individual needs. They can also be utilized by civic organizations, schools, churches, community centers, or anyone else seeking to get people together for fun, entertainment and education.