Our Day to End Poverty: 24 Ways You Can Make a Difference

by Shannon Daley-Harris, Karen Speerstra, Jeffrey Keenan

Book Overview

Our Day to End Poverty invites us to look at the twenty-four hours in our very ordinary days and to begin to think about poverty in new and creative ways. The authors offer scores of simple actions... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1576754464
• ISBN13: 9781576754467
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Offers a wealth of experience-tested strategies that truly make the world a better place to live in.

Our Day to End Poverty: 24 Ways You Can Make a Difference is a guide for readers of all walks of life to making a difference for the better at home and around the world. Using the 24-hour day as a framework, Our Day to End Poverty discusses 24 common daily activities and, in context, the things ordinary people can do to alleviate poverty during the course of their normal lives. From guidelines for charitable giving, to expanding access to the enormously successful microfinance programs, to "volunteer vacations" that enable one to travel with a purpose, to speaking up for social justice through writing letters to elected officials, Our Day to End Poverty offers a wealth of experience-tested strategies that truly make the world a better place to live in. Highly recommended.

We Can All Make a Difference

Have you ever felt the urge to "do something" when faced with searing images of poverty? Perhaps you have lingered for a moment over photographs of a starving child in Africa, a flood victim in Asia, a poor family coping with a natural disaster or illness in your own neighborhood, or a hundred other reminders of poverty on our planet. Like most of us,you may feel helpless. This book is aimed directly at people who want to help but don't know how. It includes links to poverty-fighting organizations that need donations, but it goes way beyond money. Examining each of the 8 UN Millenium Summit goals, it lists numerous simple activities we can initiate in our families, our communities, our places of worship, and on our own. Clearly written ideas, grouped under the headings "Learn," "Contribute," "Serve," and "Live," should prompt all of us to "do something," starting right now.

I Am Now a Daily Poverty Fighter

Thank you to the authors for bringing local/global poverty issues and solutions to the front door step with urgency, actions and respect for what is already in our hearts. You have created an awareness and checklist that transform concern into action. May I say that I'm stunned to find the UN Millennium Development goals new to me after seven years of activity. Such a global common good should be front page news and top of mind for all of our work and life efforts. With this smart guide, schools, book clubs, libraries, individual citizens and all public and private institutions have a way to make a daily difference that suits them. Your book enlists all of us in a war with no opposition but inaction and ignorance - a war we can win. And your approach shows us how efforts of any size contribute. I am now a daily poverty fighter.

Moving Beyond Concern

Like many people, I have had a longstanding concern about poverty and the related problems people face on a daily basis (preventable deaths, unnecessary suffering, and inadequate education just to name a few). Our Day to End Poverty provides a wonderful opportunity to move beyond concern into action. Written in a style that brings forward the immediacy of poverty-related issues, Our Day to End Poverty is a diverse and interesting guidebook, providing hundreds of possibilities for actions anyone can take. Discussing an issue like poverty that continues to have such wide-spread and devastating impacts it would be easy for the authors to drown or overload you with the enormity of the task we all face. Instead, they treat poverty, with the turn of every page, as a problem we can beat through individual and collective action. Exploring the actions laid-out in the book opened doors to other possibilities, and has started to help me uncover new ideas about new places I can help and encourage others to join me. All of this, and I am truly only beginning to explore the depth of this book. I would venture to say that this book also provides a tool equal useful for an idealistic young graduate or someone considering how they could give back in their retirement years.