Be the next (or first) Episcopal video star

We've collected some good resources on how to lobby your senators and representatives ... but they're predictably dry and dull. So we figured we'd put your creative talent to work on this.

What we're looking for is a 3-10 minute video that is edgy (even over the edge) and entertaining/hilarious that shows people how to lobby and as a contrast (and here's probably where the funny comes in) how NOT to lobby.

AND THERE'S A PRIZE (that keeps on growing!) So far we have $600 for the winner to either

-donate to an MDG-related organization of their choosing
-put toward an airline ticket for them to travel to the developing world to do MDG work

All entries will be put up on the EGR website and the winner will get their video (with credit given) on the homepage of the EGR website and YouTube group (and we'll spam the Church with emails telling them to watch it) plus we'll play it at diocesan conventions and any other places where we talk about political action for the MDGs.

If you're interested, just email me and I'll send you the "how to lobby" materials we've collected for you to work off of. Deadline for finished product is June 15.

Forward this to anyone you think might be interested. And don't miss this chance to be the next Spike Lee of funny Episcopal short films on lobbying for the MDGs!

Honor Your Mother

Here's the latest from the ONE Campaign -- a great, easy action for Mother's Day:
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Every year, 10 million mothers lose a child under the age of 5 to a completely preventable disease. This Mother's Day, you have an opportunity to give these mothers, and yours, a special gift.

Yesterday morning Congress introduced the U.S. Commitment to Global Child Survival Act. It will provide resources for simple and cost effective tools to save the lives of the 30,000 children who die each day from treatable infections, waterborne illness, malnutrition, and the half a million mothers who die from complications in childbirth.

1. Today, you can honor mothers around the world by sending a letter to your members of Congress asking them to support the Global Child Survival Act.

2. You'll then be taken to a screen where you can send a special ONE Mother's Day greeting to let mothers know you did this in their honor.


Sponsored by Representatives Betty McCollum (D-MN) and Christopher Shays (R-CT) and Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Gordon Smith (R-OR), the act sets realistic and effective guidelines for child survival programs and quadruples funding for these programs over the next three years.

This bill doesn't just save lives; it empowers mothers to provide for their children so they can safely give their children the gift of life.

Write your member of Congress and encourage them to support the Global Child Survival Act and send a ONE Mother's Day card.

The scale of America's response to this great tragedy has been woefully inadequate, but we have the power to save lives if we take action today on behalf of mothers around the world.

Happy Mother's Day,

Susan McCue, ONE.org

Mother's Day Bulletin Insert on MDGs, AWE

Follow this link to a full-color, camera-ready bulletin insert by Episcopal Life.

Here's the text:

Mother’s Day started as Mother’s Peace Day in 1870 when activist Julia Ward Howe – underscoring the pain and suffering caused by the Civil War – urged women to come together in solidarity against warfare in all forms.

To advance this cause, Howe – who also wrote the text of the Battle Hymn of the Republic – penned in Boston her Mother’s Day Proclamation: “Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears! Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, ‘Disarm, Disarm!’ … In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”

President Woodrow Wilson’s official 1912 declaration of Mother’s Day dropped the word “Peace,” ironically two years before the outbreak of World War I. Today, peacemaking remains much on the minds of the world’s mothers, especially those with children deployed in active duty – and also those who must struggle daily to provide necessities for their children.

The Episcopal Church is daily engaged in assisting with these concerns. A notable example within U.S. borders are the efforts through which congregations and individuals are helping Gulf Coast residents rebuild their lives after the 2005 hurricanes.

Internationally, the Episcopal Church’s engagement of the Millennium Development Goals brings central focus to the needs of women and children in eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, in achieving universal primary education for girls as well as boys, in promoting gender equality and empowering women, in reducing child mortality and improving maternal health.

[For more on the Episcopal Church’s efforts in these areas, visit http://www.globalgood.org.]

The need for sharing in these efforts is underscored by the following text written by a girl living in the Prachakittisuk Church Orphanage in Chiangrai, Thailand. Her writing is displayed as part of a collection of art, poetry and essays created for Anglican Women’s Empowerment, an international grassroots organization founded in 2003 to promote gender equity and to mobilize the power of women to pursue a humane agenda worldwide. [For more on AWE, visit http://www.episcopalchurch.org/uncsw.htm]

Essay About My Mother

My teacher asked our class to write an essay about our mothers. The essay is due tomorrow. But this assignment is too diffi cult for me. I don’t have a mother.

How can I write a good essay?

I don’t understand about a mother’s care. Is it true that a mother’s hug is warm? Eating a family dinner is only a dream for me. I’ve never heard a mother’s lullaby. I’ve never felt the warmth of someone tucking me into bed. My heart has never been warm even when I’m warm in bed. I always sleep alone.

I don’t have anything to write for this assignment. I can’t turn anything in for the teacher to read tomorrow. My paper only has tear drops on it.

Mother, if you still alive, wherever you are, whoever you are, please send love to me. If you hear me now, please think of me just a little bit.

I promise I will be a good child.

Microfinancing gains pace in Africa

Ever since Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize, microfinance has been center stage in the development world ... and with good reason. It's a way of bypassing often-corrupt governmental systems and getting money right where it can do the most good ... building economic power on the grassroots level.

The article below outlines some of the growth.

However, as with everything, there is potential for profiteering and abuse. Two of the best examples of Episcopal-based microfinance I know of are Five Talents International and Opportunity Bank of Rwanda. While neither is officially part of the Episcopal Church or Anglican Communion, both have strong Episcopal origins and relationships. Both also are excellent examples of best practices in the field.

By Bosire Nyairo
Reuters
Wednesday, May 2, 2007

NAIROBI: Selling vegetables at a stall in a filthy open-air market in Nairobi, Fatma Amina barely makes enough to feed her four children, let alone give them an education that would lift the family out of poverty.

The Kenyan government receives millions of dollars in aid to fight poverty, but little of it is available to small traders like Amina unless they can put up collateral.

"I hear of donors but where are they?" Amina said.

But that situation may be changing as African countries follow the lead of Asia, where tens of millions of people have obtained small loans, thanks to an explosion of microfinance operations.

Kenya's Microfinance Act, signed into law late last year, provides a legal framework regulating lenders, known in the industry as microfinance institutions.

"It makes business sense for the government to have a clear policy because this is the fastest growing sector of the economy," said Winnie Kathurima, a general manager at Equity Bank, which won an international award in 2005 for its role in providing loans to microentrepreneurs.

Microfinance has been around for decades, but has mushroomed in recent years, especially in Asia where nearly 100 million people have access to it, according to the Microcredit Summit Campaign, which hopes to bring such services to 175 million of the world's poorest families by the end of 2015.

In Africa, the poorest continent, the campaign's figures show seven million people had access to microcredit at the end of 2005.

Germany will press rich nations at a Group of 8 summit meeting in June to create a microcredit fund for African entrepreneurs as a way to help the continent's poorest, the international development minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, said in February.

Anna Awimbo, the Microcredit Summit Campaign's research director, said, "There's a long way to go." She added, "It may look daunting, but there is such a huge potential for growth and that's the region where we are most likely to see the biggest growth."

Some governments have already made progress.

Read the rest of the article here.

The Millennium Development Goals: Broken promises

Thanks to Newland Smith (EGR contact for Diocese of Chicago) who found this article in the online Sunday Times of Sri Lanka!

By Jeffrey Sachs

The Millennium Development Goals are the world's agreed goals to cut poverty, hunger, and disease. Established in 2000, their targets were to be met by 2015. We are now at the halfway point. So far, despite endless words about increasing aid to poor countries, the rich G-8 countries are reneging on their part of the bargain.

Cynicism abounds here. At the G-8 Gleneagles Summit in 2005, member countries pledged to double aid to Africa by 2010. Soon after the summit, I was invited to a small, high-level meeting to discuss the summit's follow-up. I asked for a spreadsheet showing the year-by-year planned increases, and the allocation of those planned increases across donor and recipient countries.

The response I received was chilling. "There will be no spreadsheets. The US has insisted on no spreadsheets." The point was clear. Though the G-8 had made a clear promise, there was no plan on how to fulfill it; indeed, there were clear instructions that there would be no such plan.

The G-8 is now reaping the consequences of its inaction. For the first year after the Gleneagles meeting, aid numbers were padded by misleading accounting on debt cancellation operations. With those debt cancellation operations largely completed, the data are now revealing the stark truth: development aid to Africa and to poor countries more generally is stagnant, contrary to all the promises that were made.

Specifically, between 2005 and 2006, overall aid to Africa, excluding debt cancellation operations, increased by a meager 2%. In fact, total official development assistance to all recipient countries, net of debt cancellation, actually declined by 2% between 2005 and 2006. Even the World Bank, which usually takes the donors' point of view, recently acknowledged that except for debt cancellation, "promises of scaled up aid have not been delivered."

Read the whole article here.

The metrics Sachs are (rightly) looking for from the G-8, resonate with me ... especially when reading Barack Obama's pledge for increased foreign aid (post below). It's all well and good to pledge an increase over four to eight years. But tell me what you're going to do in your first 100 days ... with your first budget. It seems to me that if we're hoping for the next president to make the MDGs a priority (and I hope we are!), that's the question we need to ask ... and not let candidates get away with long-term pledges that most likely will be forgotten by the electorate.

EPPN Alert: Urge President Bush to Bring Hope To Orphans Around the World

Here is the latest Urgent Action from the Episcopal Public Policy Network. To get personalized actions in your email box, join EPPN.

In the weeks leading up to Mothers' Day, Americans committed to the fight against global poverty are coming together to urge President Bush to launch a bold new initiative to bring access to education to orphans and vulnerable children around the world. You may have read about it, or seen it on TV last week, as Angelina Jolie, Episcopal priest Mpho Tutu, and others held a press conference in Washington that highlighted the initiative. This initiative is particularly important for girls, the future mothers, who disproportionately lack access to education in the developing world.

The Crisis:
By 2010, more than 20 million children around the world will have lost their parents to HIV/AIDS. Millions more children will be orphaned as a result of malaria, tuberculosis, conflict, and other facets of poverty.

In addition to food, water, and proper health care, each of these children will need access to education if they are to grow up strong and healthy and able to lift themselves out of poverty. In many poor countries around the world, children going to government schools must pay school fees for things such as books, required uniforms, and classroom construction. These fees and other costs make it impossible
for children living in poverty, particularly orphans, to attend school. Right now, more than 100 million children between the ages of six and eleven – 57 percent of whom are girls – are not in school.

Providing access to education for these children is a critical piece of the world's efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. To learn more, visit Global Action for Children, an organization the Episcopal Church helped found in 2003.

What you can do:
You can help bring hope to these children by emailing President Bush today and asking him to launch a new $2.5 billion initiative that will bring education to millions of orphans and vulnerable children. Click here to email the President:

Obama makes foreign aid pledge - but are the numbers right?

On April 23, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama delievered a foreign policy speech in Chicago which included these words:

Delivering on these universal aspirations requires basic sustenance like food and clean water; medicine and shelter. It also requires a society that is supported by the pillars of a sustainable democracy -- a strong legislature, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, a vibrant civil society, a free press, and an honest police force. It requires building the capacity of the world's weakest states and providing them what they need to reduce poverty, build healthy and educated communities, develop markets, and generate wealth. And it requires states that have the capacity to fight terrorism, halt the proliferation of deadly weapons, and build the health care infrastructure needed to prevent and treat such deadly diseases as HIV/AIDS and malaria.

As President, I will double our annual investments in meeting these challenges to $50 billion by 2012 [emphasis added] and ensure that those new resources are directed towards these strategic goals.

For the last twenty years, U.S. foreign aid funding has done little more than keep pace with inflation. Doubling our foreign assistance spending by 2012 will help meet the challenge laid out by Tony Blair at the 2005 G-8 conference at Gleneagles, and it will help push the rest of the developed world to invest in security and opportunity. As we have seen recently with large increases in funding for our AIDS programs, we have the capacity to make sure this funding makes a real difference.

Obama is the second presidential candidate to make a pledge regarding foreign aid and global poverty (John Edwards being the other), so this is a big deal.

However, there is some question as to whether Obama's numbers are correct.

Blogger Steve Clemons applauds his intentions but says his math is off:

I like Obama's intent -- and his worthy goals -- but it's important not to brush over or white-wash the real starting point of the aid dollars that Obama wants to increase.

If we give Obama's number crunchers the benefit of the doubt on the $25 billion level of current assistance the US is providing, there are only a few potential explanations for these numbers.

Most sources peg American poverty-focused development assistance at $16.7 billion. The OECD bumps this to $22.7 billion because the OECD includes a few non-recurring major debt relief packages in Iraq and Afghanistan -- while most of the professionals in this field do not count debt relief as normalized poverty assistance.

Obama may be defining foreign assistance in broad terms which merges aid and debt relief -- including funding that includes non-proliferation efforts, "GWOT" related efforts, etc. (but this is not customary in any way among professionals who work in the foreign assistance arena). Alternatively, Obama may just rounding up for political effect.

If Obama targeted $35 billion in real global poverty assistance, then he'd be developing what was 'real' rather than imagined in America's aid budget.

To provide some further context for current budget levels, these numbers may be helpful:

FY 2007

International Affairs Budget (includes poverty aid and diplomacy)-$32.6 billion

Poverty-Focused Development Assistance-$16.7 billion (according to DATA.org)
$22.7 billion (according to OECD - includes debt cancellation in Iraq and Afghanistan)

Defense Budget (for comparison)- $447.4 billion

FY 2008

International Affairs Budget (includes poverty aid and diplomacy)- $36.5 to $39.8 billion

Poverty-Focused Development Assistance- $19 billion request (according to DATA.org)

Defense Budget (for comparison)- $623.5 billion

Read his whole post here.