"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." - Brazilian archbishop Dom Helder Camara

Get Organized: Poverty

The facts:

• One billion of the world's six-plus billion people are not "on the first rung of the development ladder" (Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty )
• Eight million people die every year because they are poor (unable to secure adequate food, clean water or medical care)
• Half the world's children are "denied a childhood" by poverty, war and the AIDS crisis, according to UNICEF
• 246 million children are child workers-working away their children due to poverty and/or gender discrimination (State of the World's Children 2006)
• More money is spent per pet per year in the United States ($460) than over 20 percent of the world's people have to live on every year
• 500,000 children go blind every year from lack of Vitamin A; 80 percent of these children die within the first year
• Amount spent annually in the US on bottled water: $10 billion; amount needed annually for the world's 1.1 billion clean-water-deprived people to have clean water: $10 billion (Peter Gleick, The World's Water )
• The US government ranks last among wealthy nations in the percentage of its Gross National Product it gives in aid to the world's poorest countries

Take Action:

Lead the way in combating poverty with positive actions

• Many specialists point to girls' education as a key ingredient in lifting families out of poverty, yet in many societies girls are taken out of school at an early age. Launch a campaign to support NCP's Give a Girl a Chance project. $120 keeps a girl in African in school for a year ($250 in Central America ).
• Set an example by you and your friends giving up fast food or movies or lunch or whatever for a week, contributing the savings to hunger relief or girls' education
• Get your group involved in the Fair Trade movement-decent pay and working conditions for the people making our clothing and sports equipment and picking our coffee, cocoa and tea. Check out:
  • NCP's Spending Money flyer is a great handout
• Check out our new Human Rights-and Wrongs page
• Take a look at Equal Exchange for good options for coffee, tea and cocoa
• And there's Students Against Sweatshops

Wake up your community or church or campus or club

• Bring in a global justice speaker for convo or class or church service; use NCP's justice-related info-blurbs in the campus paper or church newsletter
• Set up a "living poverty" station on campus or the church lawn or at the community park featuring women pounding stones into gravel (paid 60 cents a day to do this in Nepal) or children strapped to a loom in Bangladesh (bonded labor can begin as young as four years old-working off their parents debt) or a sweatshop where young people make our clothes, working in silence as they are berated by supervisors to increase production and not spend too much time on restroom breaks
• Monitor food waste for a week in the cafeteria, then challenge students to waste less (half the food the US produces ends up as waste)
• Get local: plan a service project at the local soup kitchen; invite homeless people to visit to share about their situation-how they got there and what they hope for

Wake up legislators!

• Get together a letter writing campaign or petition drive to tell Congress to raise the amount the US gives in aid to the world's poorest people-shame them by reminding them that we're last among wealthy nations as a percent of GNP! [House of Representatives, Washington , DC 20515 ; United States Senate, Washington , DC 20510 ]
• Contact Bread for the World for the latest anti-hunger legislation