If the Poverty Busters Giving Circle’s mission is to eliminate poverty, then why did we just choose to donate to Deworm the World?

According to Poor Economics, each year of education increases earnings more or less proportionally. So, if we’re interested in ending poverty, then we’re interested in people getting educated.

In the developing world, enrollment in primary school keeps increasing, but absenteeism is high due in part to treatable illnesses. In fact, over 600 million school-age children are infected with parasitic worms. Parasitic worm infections can cause immediate illnesses, but as the worms accumulate and grow they steal more and nutrients from their hosts causing long-term illnesses and fatigue, too. Children with parasitic infections are much less likely at attend school and to do well in school. And since there is a direct relationship between a child’s education and their future income, keeping children in school helps break the cycle of poverty.

According to Deworm The World, the benefits of school-based deworming are both immediate and enduring. Regular treatment can reduce school absenteeism by 25% and increase adult earnings by over 20%. It is also a program that is very cheap to implement and costs only about .50 cents per child per year. So, our $540 donation will help 1,080 children receive deworming medication.

We liked that Deworm the World worked with the local community structure to administer the medication through the school systems and they partnered with the national governments to design a program that can maintained through the long-term. Since children are constantly exposed to these parasites, continuous treatment is essential to the success of the deworming program.

What’s Next?

We’ll gear up for our next donation cycle. Members can nominate an organization if they’d like, and those nominees will be vetted by the donation committee.

We ask

• Is the program well-designed?
• Will it make an impact?
• Does it cause unintentional harm?
• Does it maintain the dignity of the recipients?
• Are the financial documents reflecting appropriate activity?
• Do they have room to handle more funding?

If you’re not asking these questions before you donate, don’t feel too bad. I wasn’t either. But when you’re part of a giving circle, you can be confident that your hard earned dollars are going to organizations that are going to do a good job with it.

Donate Better. Donate With Others.

You’re invited to be a part of our giving circle and make a big impact with small bucks.

What does $25 buy you? Dinner for two? Movie and a popcorn? The ways we spend $25 are endless and happen everyday without even thinking about. Instead, we pooled our $25 and were able to buy an opportunity for a new life for family.

Kickstart International Wins December’s Vote

The Poverty Busters Giving Circle is intent on helping people help themselves out of poverty, because we know that “the poor” are capable when given access to the tools and the opportunities. Despite good intentions, giving poor people free stuff undermines their self-confidence, self-respect, perpetuates the cycle of poverty, and is a bad idea for several other reasons.

Kickstart International fits our philosophy perfectly. They sell a subsidized water pump to rural African farms. Because of this pump, the farmer can reliably irrigate his or her crops resulting in a reliable food source for the family and a reliable food surplus to sell to others. Not wanting to deprive locals of jobs, they partner with local shops to market and sell the pumps resulting in even more economic opportunity.

They have an absolute focus on lifting people out of poverty through market economics and have the most impressive results tracking system we’ve seen. They don’t just say that they’ve helped 606,800 people out of poverty and created 121,400 new businesses. They have the data to back it up. You can read the full scope of their impact and their methodology at their website.

Do you want to do something BIG with your $25? Join the Poverty Busters Giving Circle and change someone’s life.

The People With Compassion for Pets Giving Circle voted to send it’s final donation of 2011 to the Denkai Animal Shelter. This no kill animal shelter was nominated by one of our giving circle members who had extensive experience as a volunteer at their organization. She witnessed time and again their unending dedication and love for saving animals in Northern Colorado and Wyoming.

Even though Denkai had our hearts, we still reviewed the organization thoroughly. We were impressed that their budget increased from $7,000 in year one of operations to more than $500,000 in income and assets during 2011 just seven years later. They’ve acquired an additional facility with acreage to provide care to more animals and are in the midst of a capital campaign to purchase the building and land on which they operate in Colorado. We believe this goes to show the extent to which they’ve been successful in launching this shelter and that our dollars were going to an organization that would be around for a long time.

In addition, after reviewing their financials from Guidestar, we could tell that their expenses are very low when compared to the amount of work they were accomplishing, so we know our dollars would be well used.

Floss Blackburn, the founder and president of Denkai, tells us that our $550 donation could do one of the following:

• Feed 1 horse for 5 months.
• Spay and neuter a total of 11 dogs saving 1,837 unwanted pets in a period of 1 year.
• Provide training services for 1 horse.
• Feed two senior horses for two months.

Taking care of animals is not cheap, and together the members of People With Compassion for Pets were able to make a much bigger impact on Denkai than we could have done alone.

Are you ready to make a bigger impact with your small donation?