Global Brigades, a non-profit dedicated to empowering under-resourced communities, has recently launched the Patient Referral Program. This new program seeks to raise funds to treat rural Honduran patients seen on Medical Brigades that require specialized or ongoing care beyond the scope of what can be provided on a one-week brigade. Using empowered.org as a fundraising platform, Global Brigades highlights a new patient every few weeks so that students from around the world can make a direct impact in helping rural Honduran patients get the medical treatment they deserve.

Given the desperate state of health care in rural Honduras, these patients will continue to suffer from severe conditions without your help. We invite you to read the following patient profile and ask that you consider making a donation today (even just $5 can go a long way). If you are interested in reading other patient profiles and sponsoring a patient, please visit the main page for the Patient Referral Program by clicking here.

To make a contribution please visit: http://fundraise.empowered.org/donation/medardo

We generally try to provide content to help groups fundraise, organize and mobilize on the Empowered Blog … this might read more like a motivational speech by Tony Robbins, but check it out:

Anyways, I driving down PCH this morning, listening to NPR and hears something troubling: the so-called king of microfinance, a Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, was being asked to stepped down as the head of the bank he’s been at the top of for 30 years (apparently Bangladesh has a law that forces retirement at a certain age and Yunus is over the legal limit of years lived).

The interesting/troubling thing to me wasn’t this semi-ridiculous law (seriously, Bangladesh?), nor was it the fact that Yunus claimed Bangladesh was just citing the law because the government wanted to take over his bank.

No, what really made me think was the final mention by the Morning Edition lady about how Yunus’ microfinance baby is starting to falter in many countries, as impoverished people were being forced into high-interest loans via “highly coercive methods” … with those giving said loans saying that competition would eventually bring those interest-rates down. Check out this WSJ blog post for a bit more background on microfi in general: http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/03/09/india-journal-harnessing-business-to-eradicate-poverty/

Sometimes, stuff like this drives me crazy: the world takes a simple yet powerful, socially conscious idea like microfinance and capitalism/greed/private enterprise/whatever still gets in the way and turns that idea upside-down … and I’m left just shaking my head wondering what happened (and why we can’t all just work towards a greater good together … sorry if that sounded like Rodney King

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Yesterday’s word of the day was sitzfleisch.

Like me, you may well subscribe to one of those cool ‘word a day’ type blogs.

If you don’t speak German, you probably won’t know the meaning of this word. But then, at once, it reminded me of Ken Burnett’s recent presentations in Australia.

Ken is the author of the seminal fundraising text, Relationship Fundraising and, at the Fundraising Institute of Australia Conference, his five sessions were highly critical of the fundraising profession.

Ken lamented how bad fundraisers and nonprofit staff are at engaging with our kind and wonderful donors, how poorly many fundraisers treat our donors, and quite frankly, how inept and negligent so many individual fundraisers are.

If that sounds a little harsh, let me explain. Ken’s fundraising career has spanned more than thirty years – perhaps longer than many of the fundraising staff in your office have been alive. As he says, at his age (I won’t even guess) he’s got nothing to lose. I hope his presentation resonated with those who needed to hear most what he had to say about them. Unfortunately, I think many thought he was speaking about those ‘other’ fundraising professionals, not themselves.

Now, what on earth does sitzfleish (pronounced, SITZ-flaish) mean? Well www.wordsmith.com explained it thus:

sitzfleisch
noun:

1. The ability to sit through or tolerate something boring.

2. The ability to endure or persist in a task.

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It’s been said that: “Money makes the world go round.” So you would think that everything in our world revolves around money.

However, volunteers don’t go out volunteering for money. Volunteerism is not premised on money at all. Volunteers do things for free!

Volunteers as Unreasonable People

Volunteers are such a strange bunch.

Yes, it would seem that volunteers are a set of unreasonable and unique people. They focus more on changing the world and making a difference. Money seems to take a lower priority in the values of volunteers.

How can I say this with such authority and assurance?

I am a volunteer myself. My name is Matthew Alberto, and I’ve been a volunteer for the United Nations World Food Programme in Bangladesh for close to two years now. In my second year of volunteering, I’ve even been inspired by the Bangladeshi pioneer of social enterprise and Nobel Laureate, Muhammad Yunus, and I run my own blog with the tagline: Social Entrepreneurship for Passionate People

Why I Started Volunteering?

I grew up in Australia but I was born in the Philippines. In Australia, I was first asked to volunteer in my teens by some of my closest friends. We would go out and hold fundraising events for the Spastic Centre such as picnics and barbecues. We’d also ask for donations from people on the street for the Starlight Foundation. I remember even hanging out with a group of refugee kids from Sudan at Sydney’s Blue Mountains with the organization called Josephite Community Aid. Now as I look back on it, there were numerous times when I would tag along to help out others.

As I grew older, I realized that I was most happy in life when I did things like that. That’s why I began studying International Relations and International Law. During my time at university, I began volunteering overseas, especially in the Philippines where I felt a close connection as my family had originally migrated from there to escape from poverty and political instability. More and more, my interest in volunteering grew. I understood that helping people and contributing was closely aligned with my mission and life purpose.

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