Jul 22, 2013 | Johann Olav Koss, Kravis Prize, Right 2 Play
Olympic gymnast Gabrielle Douglas and two fellow U.S. gymnasts have signed on as Athlete Ambassadors with Right To Play, an organization founded by Olympic speed skater Johann Olav Koss to help disadvantaged children around the world. Koss and his organization are this year’s recipient of the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Nonprofit Leadership. Koss visited Claremont McKenna College in April to receive the award from its founders, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis ’67. Douglas, a member of “The Fierce Five” who won a team gold medal at the Summer Olympics held in London last year, will serve as a Right To Play ambassador along with Olympic gymnasts and medalists Jonathan Horton and Alicia Sacramone, Right To Play announced earlier this month in a press release. The announcement is part of a new, larger partnership between Right To Play and USA Gymnastics to bring the same kind of support to U.S. youth that Right To Play has been bringing to other countries since it was established in 2000. “There is no doubt in my mind that this partnership can make a positive difference in the lives of disadvantaged youth in the United States,” said Steve Penny, president of USA Gymnastics. “Gymnastics teaches the value of physical activity and many of the life skills needed to be healthy and achieve success.” Koss added that his organization is “honored” and “excited” about a new effort “bridging disadvantaged communities in the U.S. with opportunities to experience sport and play specifically through gymnastics.” The partnership is slated to extend through 2016. Douglas said she is excited to join Horton and Sacramone in inspiring children and... read more
Jul 18, 2013 | BRAC, BRAC UK, BRAC USA, Civil Society, Fazle Abed, Kravis Prize
Central European University has awarded the 18th Open Society Prize to Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder and chairperson of BRAC, recipient of the Kravis Prize in 2007, and the affiliated BRAC University, at its commencement ceremony in June. The Open Society Prize, which is given “to an outstanding individual whose achievements have contributed substantially to the creation of an open society,” has been awarded at past ceremonies to a multitude of prominent world figures, including: Sir Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and its Enemies; Vaclav Havel, playwright and former president of the Czech Republic; Richard Holbrooke, the late senior U.S. diplomat; and Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations. During his acceptance speech, Abed described his early experiences with BRAC and reflected on the lessons that he has learned along the way with the organization: “After my country’s independence, I began working to try to help the poor of Bangladesh. My early colleagues and I initially thought that BRAC would be a short-term relief effort. But the realities of entrenched poverty soon changed our minds. I have learned much along the way. Perhaps the most important thing I learned was that when you create the right conditions, poor people will do the hard work of defeating poverty themselves.” RELATED: Landesa offers perspectives on China’s changing... read more
Jul 3, 2013 | Kravis Prize, Landesa, Roy Prosterman
What is happening in China? When China unveiled its plan to urbanize over 250 million rural Chinese over the next dozen years, prestigious news outlets turned to Landesa, whose founder Roy Prosterman was 2009 Kravis Prize winner, for its expertise on land-rights issues. In “China’s Great Uprooting,” an article that is part of a series by The New York Times on that nation’s changing identity, Gao Yu, the China country director for Landesa, offered commentary to the news outlet on some major concerns regarding China’s program. Gao first spoke on the impulse to modernize, noting how “[t]here’s this feeling that we have to modernize, we have to urbanize and this is our national-development strategy.” The speed of the development campaign is also a cause for concern as Gao Yu compares it, in the article, to the disastrous Maoist campaign in the 1950s: “It’s almost like another Great Leap Forward.” That said, the new policy could also prevent local governments from forcibly taking over rural land. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, local officials provide limited compensation to the farmers, and then sell long-term leases to factory owners and real estate developers. Li Ping, senior attorney at the Beijing office of Landesa, spoke on the motivations of local governments in an interview with Bloomberg: “Local governments have an incentive to push this distorted urbanization, to grab all that profit.” The modernization policy would increase the involvement of the federal government, which would remove and organize the incentives of the local government urbanization plans. As China’s ambitious agenda begins to be implemented, it is unclear whether it will be successful or damaging to that country’s future but... read more
Jun 21, 2013 | FAWE, Kravis Prize, Landesa, Pratham
The needs of the poor and the disadvantaged don’t stop in the summer, and neither have the efforts of several Kravis Prize recipients, who are continuing to deliver innovative aid to communities around the world. In recent weeks, a new Pratham partnership enjoyed major media attention, Landesa produced an impact video, and FAWE launched a remarkable African research series. ************** The recent partnership between Pratham and the Wrigley Company Foundation was featured in the Times of India. According to the article, the Wrigley Company Foundation announced the launch of a three-year, $1 million educational partnership with Pratham, the largest non-governmental education organization in India. The goal of the new effort is to bring more quality education to underprivileged children in India. Specifically, the initiative plans to target learning gaps in the farming districts of Uttar Pradesh. The organization’s executives hope to reach 40,000 children in 1,000 villages. In an interview with the Times, Pratham co-founder and CEO Madhav Chavan explained that ”Uttar Pradesh has low learning levels as shown by the Annual Survey of Educational Report/2012 and we hope to address these problems in the region.” ************** This month, Landesa released a video to allow viewers to watch what happens when women are given equal rights to land and family resources as a result of Kenya’s new constitution and an innovation pilot program. The short video follows Mary Sadera, who lives in the forested area of Ol Pusimoru. She explains her day-to-day life, as well as how her and her children’s futures will change because of the tribal elders’ new thinking on women’s land rights. View the five-minute video, titled “A Revolution from the Ground... read more
Jun 18, 2013 | AIL, Education, Female Empowerment, Sakena Yacoobi
Sakena Yacoobi, Founder and Executive Director of the Afghan Institute of Learning, was among an esteemed group of recipients who were presented earlier this month with honorary degrees during the 266th Commencement Ceremony at Princeton University. Yacoobi, who was selected for her efforts to educate women and children in Afghanistan with her organization AIL, was joined on the Princeton stage by novelist Toni Morrison and architect Frank Gehry, among several others. Also in June, the Huffington Post featured a piece by Sakena Yacoobi entitled, “Literacy and Networking for Afghan Women Through Texting.” Yacoobi writes about the lack of literacy in Afghanistan, especially among women. The article documents the efforts of her organization to empower women through education and to improve conditions in Afghanistan as a whole. Sakena writes that the organization could be used as model by other nations that wish to accelerate literacy education and provides a network for Afghan women to build relationships and foster more interaction and dialogue in their society. In the West, we take this sense of interconnectedness for granted, but for the women of Afghanistan, Yacoobi says, it is an exciting, new development: “The women of Afghanistan become energized by learning and they are also excited to have a way to communicate with one another. This program could be used in other nations to help accelerate literacy education, but the impact that access to mobile phones and knowledge of how to use them has on Afghan women is far greater than just accelerating literacy. The women can build and maintain relationships with other women to whom they are not related, something which is incredibly difficult in Afghan society.... read more
