Marriage and Pregnancy
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Disney Offers $1 Million Match for 'Stretch' Gifts
Activist-philanthropist Abigail Disney announced May 3 she would match paired "stretch gifts" to the New York Women"s Foundation and other social change nonprofits up to a total of $1 million. (WOMENSENEWS) At the May 3 annual fundraising breakfast for the New York Women"s Foundation, Abigail Disney issued a million dollar challenge to all who care about justice and social change and who believe they live in abundance. She will match "stretch" gifts, that is, donations that are the equivalent to the cost of a luxury item the contributor planned to buy and will forego. Disney"s terms are that the "stretch" contributions must be to the New York Women"s Foundation and another justice or social change organization. She will match these donations up to a total of $1 million of her own funds in a grant to the New York Women"s Foundation. Her challenge is a response to her recent trip to Africa where she saw an infant on the edge of death from starvation and her sense of what she called the "pretzel" of philanthropy: If she provided the child"s mother funds for food, the money would be quickly gone and the child hungry once again. And there were many more hungry babies; more all the time, she said, including many who live in Harlem, blocks away from her home. At the same time, she explained, as a businesswoman she sits in meetings during which she hears that $5 million is too small an amount to bother investing. Through this campaign of matched gift pairs, Disney is emphasizing the "interdependence" of those in need and those with abundance. Disney"s Rules for the Match For Disney to match your "stretch" gift, you must Make a contribution to the New York Women"s Foundation before August 1, 2007. Make a second contribution to the justice or social change organization of your choice, also by August 1, 2007, and it should be: a "stretch" for you. In other words, it must be more than you would usually give and be instead of something else you wanted to purchase. Be for an organization that reflects your deepest passion about justice and social change. [----------] Disney"s May 3 Declaration of Interdependence (NEW YORK) May 3--The great Paul Farmer points out that there is an important difference between solidarity and pragmatic solidarity. Solidarity with the suffering and oppression of others is valuable and important, but without pragmatism it is really only cheerleading. Pragmatic solidarity is an acknowledgment that we are all totally and irrevocably interdependent and it accepts all of the implied rewards and responsibilities of that interdependence. Last December while I was in Liberia, I went out to the countryside to see some programs for women. We went to a small village with no water, no electricity--no nothing--in an area that had been utterly devastated by 14 years of civil war. We listened to some resilient women tell us about their work. It was wonderful, but I couldn"t help but be distracted by a small girl to my left, who lay with her head in her mother"s lap, dozing. Something was off about her. Her mother had dressed this little girl in a frilly dress, and tied her skimpy curls up with two perfect red bows. And yet, the baby"s head was too large for her body. Her eyes were vacant and teary, her hair too thin, and a little line of dry white saliva ran down from the corner of her mouth. I asked the mayor of the village what was wrong with this little girl. She said, simply, "She"s hungry." I said, "Yes, but is she sick too?" She said, "No, no, just hungry and I don"t think she has more than a few days left." Facing the Pretzel of Philanthropy I had to do something. I thought, "I have a granola bar in my bag; I should feed her." But then I thought, "Yes, but she"ll just be hungry again tomorrow. I should give the mother money for food. Well yes, but there isn"t much to buy here and she"ll just run out eventually, so I should give a larger amount to the mother and ask the mayor to help the mom find a job etc, etc, but then of course there are all those other babies and how can I help them," and so on and so forth. I went around and around like this until one other thought suddenly boomed in my head. It said, "For God"s sake just shut up and feed the baby!" I happen to know that if I brought this baby here and sat her down in front of each of you, you would all probably go through some similar process, and you"d end up right where I did. Feed the baby. It"s pretty simple. And I know this room; I know this city; I know this country. We are generous and humane people and we are simply not wired to sit next to a starving baby without feeding her. So if that"s the case why are so many babies hungry? And why, every single year of every one of our lives on earth have they just gotten hungrier and hungrier? With all the charity and all the development and all the generosity, why do we continue to lose ground? While the reasons for this are complicated one is clear: even though we do a lot, the bar for generosity is simply too low. I live a strange life. I come home from Africa and head straight to one meeting or other at which we are likely to be discussing a bake sale, or a field trip, or--and the irony of this is almost unbearable--the problem of childhood obesity. Jolted by the Culture of Excess This is not just a question of me feeling guilty and taking that out on all of you kind people. When I come home from Africa what gives me the biggest jolt of disbelief is not my life but my culture. It is a culture of excess, of materialism, a culture which elevates the trivial and trivializes the valuable. The problem is that we"ve got too much stuff. And we spend a lot of time in meetings and at stores thinking about how to deploy our too much stuff. We go to gyms to work off too much food. And Madison Avenue is furiously trying to convince you of new stuff you absolutely have to have that you haven"t even heard of yet. I move in two entirely opposite worlds and it is growing increasingly difficult to deal with the contrast between them when I know that one side controls many of the answers to the agonies of the other. As a businesswoman, I go to meetings with people who tell me $5 million is too small an amount to bother investing and with money managers who complain that there is too much money out there to invest for a decent return. We are choking on money. Something is horribly, horribly wrong with this picture, isn"t there? In my view it is simply unjust and morally reprehensible to have so much money and so few people on one side of the world while there is so much need and so little help on the other. I think it is not only unjust, but frankly untenable. Wouldn"t common sense tell you that something"s gotta give, and soon? In fact, from a global point of view there are starving babies all around us that we can"t--or won"t--see. Spiritually and morally that baby sits right next to you and me every day, but we"ve got oceans to our sides and walls to the north and south and a media that is more concerned with whether or not Britney remembered her underpants last night than with helping us understand that there is a big world out there and it looks nothing like the fantasyland we have built here on this island of wealth and privilege. Mind you, this well insulated island of privilege has its own pockets of poverty, God knows. That"s why we are here today after all. An African American baby boy born in Harlem today is less likely to reach adulthood than a boy born in Bangladesh. The fact that some of the worst pockets of poverty exist within a few miles of the media capital of the world makes it all the more astonishing that this media still does not tell us the whole, unvarnished truth about the nature and extent of global inequity. Standing on Pile of Life Jackets If I sit by and watch somebody drown when I have a life jacket in my hands, can I really say that it was a tragedy, none of my doing, an accident? I know I didn"t put them there to drown, after all, but I didn"t reach out to help either. And saying that we were distracted by the dancing on the Lido deck is no excuse. I ask you, what is required of us in a world in which 95 percent of us are drowning and 5 percent are standing on a pile of life jackets that we don"t want to admit are right there under our feet? Now I know what you are thinking. Who the hell is she, this heiress, to tell us that we don"t do enough, that we have too much money? And some of us here have very little indeed, I recognize that. If you want to shoot the messenger, go ahead, I don"t blame you. Just promise me that you will still judge the message on its own merits because I think you know it still holds up. We can all do better. I am certain that I could do far, far better, and it is getting too hard to go back to Africa again and again, knowing that I have let another opportunity to shout this from the rooftops pass. This is absolutely not to say that there is something inherently wrong with an expensive purse, a Mercedes Benz or a tummy tuck. There is, in fact, an innate human longing for beauty. It is the same longing that brings art into the world. And a world without it would be gray indeed. But it is a question of degree. It is a question of--dare I say it--decency. It"s a question not of the Mercedes Benz, but of how many of them? How many purses, how many pairs of shoes or bottles of wine? Or boats or cars or houses? How much money could we unlock if we just skimmed 10 percent off the top of this country"s luxury spending? And don"t forget it"s not just the rich who spend on luxuries, since the luxury lobby has done a brilliant job of conning everyone into the idea that these are necessary reflections of our self worth. And it is precisely this confusion of needing with wanting, this tendency to get mixed up about what is necessary to live and what living is genuinely about that is making us as a nation very, very unhappy. Abigail"sPages: [1] 2
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06.04.2012