Global Call October 22

Allison started the call by reading a portion of the commencement address given by Bill Gates at Harvard. Truly inspiring. She is going to send it to me and I will share it here. It can be found at the end of this blog entry.

We're still working on getting Congressman Loebsack to sign on to the World Bank letter. At Cornell last Friday seven students made phone calls to his Washington office. At our meeting Monday we wrote six letters. At the training last night at the Muslim American Society I gave the six new RESULTS volunteers the Congressman's phone number and Megan's name, and the laser talk from the website, and encouraged them to get their feet wet by making a call and leaving a message for Meagan. I left seven messages before I got to speak with her personally. Persistence is the key, I guess.

The Senate World Bank letter is now ready so I'm going to make calls tomorrow morning to Senators Grassley and Harkin.

I need to tell you something exciting about the training last night at MAS. A week ago there was a man in Egypt who committed suicide because he couldn't afford to feed his 12 children. We talked about what a tragedy that was, and what a microcredit loan could have meant to that family. More powerful stories are going to be shared.

You'll be truly excited by these newest members of our group, as I am. During welcome and introductions at our November meeting we'll see how much we all have in common, and how we are all going to be enriched by these new relationships.

Bill Gates address:
You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world’s inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you’ve had a chance to think about how – in this age of accelerating technology – we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.

Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.

During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States.

We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.

If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”

So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let these children die?”

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.
But you and I have both.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.

If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.