Abundance Foundation partners with visionaries who transform scarcity into abundance. Our partners train, support and empower local leaders to create new capabilities that result in lasting improvement in quality of life.
The work of PIH has three goals: to care for patients in difficult and resource-poor settings, to alleviate the root causes of disease in their communities, and to share lessons learned around the world. Through long-term partnerships with sister organizations, PIH brings the benefits of modern medical science to those most in need and works to alleviate the crushing economic and social burdens of poverty that exacerbate disease. PIH believes that health is a fundamental right, not a privilege. In addition to direct care, PIH works to rebuild public health systems and infrastructure, provides training and support for local medical staff, and employs community health workers as agents of change to break the vicious cycle of poverty and disease. Learn more at www.pih.org
Under the leadership of its Chair, Dr. Paul Farmer, the Programs in Global Health and Social Change at Harvard Medical School works to transform health care delivery capacity for patients and communities, not just within the reach of Boston or the United States, but also around the globe, for the people in greatest need. Recent innovations in health and communications technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for enhancing the capacity of all nations for equitable, excellent health care delivery. The Department of Global Health and Social Change at Harvard Medical School is developing five programs with clinical foci corresponding to major unmet burdens of disease in resource poor settings: infectious disease, non-communicable disease, mental health, surgery, and neonatal health. Learn more at www.ghsm.hms.harvard.edu
The Global Health Delivery Program at Harvard aims to improve health among disadvantaged populations worldwide by systematizing the study of global health delivery and rapidly disseminating knowledge to practitioners through a range of coordinated initiatives. GHDonline is the platform of Professional Virtual Communities developed by the Global Health Delivery Project (GHD). GHDonline enables open collaboration between global health implementers and organizations in online “communities of practice” in order to create a new breadth of knowledge applicable in the field and to democratize access to critical information in order to improve the delivery of health care worldwide. Learn more at www.ghdonline.org
The worst drought in 60 years threatens an already struggling people in Somalia and its neighboring countries in the parched Horn of Africa. Man-made problems like rising food prices, a crippled economy, and a lack of central government have only heightened the devastating effects of this natural disaster.
The FEED Africa Emergency Fund supports organizations like UNICEF and the World Food Programme that are providing critical services on the ground to the more than ten million children and families who urgently need aid. Working with the Abundance Foundation, with the guidance of American Jewish World Service, the Africa Emergency Fund will also support small, grassroots organizations who are working toward long-term sustainability and food security. www.thefeedfoundation.org
Global Pediatric Alliance seeks to promote grassroots empowerment and improve child and maternal health by providing educational, technical, and financial support for community-based health projects in Latin America. GPA’s evolution has been guided by its commitment to empowerment, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability. With this focus, GPA develops methods to help improve the lives of women and children in Latin America. www.globalpediatricalliance.org
Ciné Institute is Haiti’s only film school and provides Haitian youth with film education, technical training, and media related micro enterprise opportunities. It integrates educational film screenings into classrooms of public schools, trains aspiring filmmakers in all aspects of production, and develops and produces films of all kinds in partnership with its students and graduates. The Institute also promotes excellence in Haitian cinema domestically and abroad and holds weekly entertainment screenings of films from around the world at its theater. Based in Jacmel, on Haiti's southern coast, Ciné Institute began as a film festival. Held for three years, Festival Film Jakmèl showed hundreds of international films free of charge to tens of thousands of Haitians. Learn more at www.cineinstitute.com
United Roots has created the first arts and multimedia center dedicated to both ecological awareness, as well as artistic and professional development for youth at the margins in Oakland and the greater San Francisco Bay Area. The Center provides programs in music, video, theater, dance, visual arts, leadership, eco-arts, and healing arts. By working in a coalition with several non-profit partners to offer media arts and green job readiness training with wraparound services, the Center prepares youth for jobs in the entertainment or green industries.
The Center features four soundproofed media and recording studios, offices, a dance studio, a secured reception area and a spacious central area for our mobile computer lab. The Center is dedicated to harnessing the power of art and creative expression to promote healing, personal and community empowerment, and a pathway out of a life of violence and jail. Many youth leaders who have participated in the Center are peacemakers that become spokespeople for social justice movements. Learn more at www.unitedrootsoakland.org
Voice of Witness uses the power of personal witness and testimony to give voice to those most closely affected by contemporary social injustice. Using oral history as a foundation, the VOW book series depicts human rights crises around the world through the stories of the men and women who experience them. Voice of Witness provides its readers -from high school students to educators, policy makers and advocates-with compelling, reality-based human rights documentation that can be used for teaching, training and advocacy. The Abundance Foundation partnered with Voice of Witness to offer “Amplifying Unheard Voices: The Power of Story,” a 4-day oral history training for educators from Grade 8 through college. Participants engaged in an interactive process that introduced the skills, ethics and social significance of creating oral history and enabled them to empower their students to create their own oral history projects. Voice of Witness was founded by Dave Eggers, founder of 826 Valencia, and physician/human rights scholar Lola Vollen. Learn more at www.voiceofwitness.org
The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is an integrated site of creative endeavor; a unique fusion of art, innovation and ideas in a social environment. It serves as a curated platform for the dynamic convergence of artists, inventors, producers, thinkers, and community to sustain multiple levels of participation, propel short and long term social change, and insure that live arts and living artists are vital to society. YBCA is a multi-disciplinary arts center with a vision to “place contemporary art at the heart of community life.” YBCA presents contemporary art from the San Francisco Bay Area and around the world that reflects the profound issues and ideas of our time, expands the boundaries of artistic practice, and celebrates the diversity of human experience and expression. Learn more at www.ybca.org
826 National is a nonprofit organization that provides strategic leadership, administration, and other resources to ensure the success of its network of eight writing and tutoring centers. 826 centers offer a variety of inventive programs that provide under-resourced students, ages 6-18, with opportunities to explore their creativity and improve their writing skills. 826 helps teachers get their classes excited about writing. Last year 826 centers in Ann Arbor, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC served 24,000 students. Its programs are completely free for all students and steeped in the simple idea that celebrating creativity is key to engaging and assisting youth. Ultimately, as public schools continue to cut back or eliminate arts programs, this model offers a sustainable way to replace arts education programming for low-income and under-resourced young people in urban areas. Learn more at www.826national.org
Fonkoze is Haiti’s “alternative bank for the poor”, working to promote democracy in Haiti through economic development. Fonkoze is a membership organization with a proven track record of supporting the rural poor through micro-lending to women borrowers. Fonkoze serves the very poor — 72% of its members were living on under $2 per day before the earthquake. Fonkoze’s clients cannot afford to rebuild their homes and would be permanently reduced to even deeper poverty and ongoing hardships than before the earthquake. Learn more at www.fonkoze.org and www.ajws.org
The Haiti Adolescent Girls Network empowers the most vulnerable Haitian girls, ages 10-19, in the wake of the devastating earthquake, through a program of social, health, and economic asset building in protective girl-only spaces locally named, “Espas Pa Mwen”. Launched in July 2010, the initiative will help break the cycle of poverty and violence for 1,000 girls and 80 peer mentors, and serve as a vehicle for building the capacity of local and international NGOs to implement girl-centered programming. The Haiti Adolescent Girls Network launched a nationwide program of Girls’ Groups in areas affected by the earthquake as well as communities that are the destinations of out-migration. The groups serve as social platform through which to connect girls to age-appropriate skills training and services such as primary and reproductive health care, financial literacy, and psycho-social support.
Digital Democracy empowers marginalized communities to use technology to build their futures. Their work uses technology to encourage democratic engagement, protect human rights and empower marginalized voices globally. Dd’s approach focuses on innovative uses of technology such as SMS messaging and new media to share critical information that will enable a more immediate and effective response from care providers, facilitate better documentation of incidents of violence, and strengthen advocacy efforts around security issues for women in Haiti. Dd is working with a coalition of legal advocates, health and psycho-social providers, and Haitian women and girls to create a comprehensive response to the growing epidemic of violence against women.
