Restore Sight and Transform Lives
Today, more than 1 billion people in the world live with visual impairment. Yet 90 percent of all blindness and vision impairment can be prevented or cured. Seva Foundation’s vision is a world free of avoidable blindness. The global non-profit organization works with local communities around the world to develop self-sustaining programs that preserve and restore sight in areas with little to no access to eye care services. Since 1978, Seva has provided surgeries, eyeglasses, medicine, and other vital eye care services to over 46 million people in more than 20 countries, with a focus on women, children, and indigenous populations, including Native Americans in the U.S. Sustainable eye care programs require staff who have both the clinical knowledge to provide high quality eye care and the skills to train others. Seva funds a variety of strategic training initiatives to increase knowledge across local partners and ensure that people can receive life-changing eye care, now and in the long term. Through this approach, trainees become trainers, hospitals become teaching institutions, and the knowledge within the country continues to renew itself. The investment lasts for generations.
80 percent of people who suffer from visual impairment live in developing countries, where not being able to see makes it nearly impossible to find work, attend school, or meet basic needs. The World Health Organization and The World Bank have stated that restoring someone’s sight is one of the most cost-effective interventions to reduce poverty.
More than half the world’s blindness is caused by cataracts, a condition that can be reversed through a simple 15-minute procedure. Seva has reduced its average program cost of cataract surgery to just $50—including both materials and surgical staff required—and the organization’s financially sustainable model leverages sliding-scale patient fees to ensure no one is turned away, regardless of their ability to pay. Sight is independence. The vast majority of visually impaired people require daily assistance from a relative, neighbor or child. Therefore, restoring one person’s sight gives two people their lives back: the person who was blind and their caregiver.
Your contribution to Seva has an immediate impact and a powerful ripple effect. Surgeries cure blindness. Glasses bring the world into focus. With restored sight, children can return to school and adults can resume work and once again provide for their families. When more people are able to lead healthy, productive lives, entire communities have a chance at a better future.
Empower Survivors of Sexual Violence
Panzi Hospital and Foundation provides holistic care for thousands of women who have been raped as a result of the ongoing conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Panzi was founded in 1999 by Dr. Denis Mukwege, an OBGYN and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate who wanted to provide the women in his community with a safe place to deliver their babies. Many of his first patients, however, were not soon-to-be mothers, but instead women and girls who had been brutally raped by armed militias using sexual violence as a weapon of war. Recognizing that medical treatment was not enough to help these women rebuild their lives in an area where rape victims are heavily stigmatized, Panzi developed an innovative holistic healing model that combined medical treatment with access to therapy, legal services, and job-skills training.
More than 20 years later, Panzi has served more than 85,000 women and girls suffering from rape- or birth-related complications, spanning in age from as young as six months old to over 80 years old. Every day, the hospital receives between five to seven new survivors seeking care. The hospital’s holistic approach centers the dignity of survivors, promotes women’s advocacy, and provides services informed by evidence-based research.
Panzi is expanding access to holistic post-rape care throughout the country by replicating it’s “One Stop Center” approach. One Stop Centers are rural hospitals where survivors can access all four pillars of the Panzi holistic healing model under one roof. This ensures that survivors only need to tell their story once, and do not need to travel to multiple organizations to get the comprehensive care they need and deserve.
Panzi supports thousands of women and girls as they transform from victims into survivors every year. In 2020 alone, nearly 5,300 survivors suffering from afflictions such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder received therapy and psychosocial support in order to regain their mental and emotional health. And 2,670 women received job-skills training and access to village savings and loans groups, which allows them to provide for themselves when many have been abandoned by their families.
Your donation can aid Panzi Foundation in their mission to empower women who have experienced sexual violence in conflict, restore the rights and dignity of survivors, expand access to holistic care, and end the use of rape as a weapon of war.
The Right Career Changes Everything.
Across the United States, talent is everywhere—opportunity is not. There are currently millions of working age adults in major metropolitan areas who have at least a high school diploma but earn less than $25,000 a year. Yet, those same areas are home to 2.4 million well-paying tech jobs, many of which are unfilled.
Per Scholas is a tuition-free education non-profit organization that prepares individuals traditionally underrepresented in the tech industry to launch meaningful, high-growth careers by equipping them with today’s most sought out industry skills. With access to continued upskilling and professional development support for at least two years post-graduation, graduates have landed jobs nationwide, in entry to mid-level roles across a wide variety of sectors.
Per Scholas creates access to careers in tech by working directly with employers, large and small, to design rigorous, bootcamp-style courses that match their hiring needs. Their tuition-free training combines business professional skills development with hands-on technical instruction for high demand jobs in Information Technology (IT), Cybersecurity, Software Engineering, Cloud Computing and more.
Learners can choose from a variety of course offerings ranging from 12-15 weeks in length. Per Scholas offers nationally recognized graduate certifications and exams for Amazon Web Services, CompTIA and Google IT Support at no extra cost. Remarkably, more than 80 percent of Per Scholas graduates find full-time employment within one year of graduating.
Per Scholas is on a mission to advance economic equity by building a more diverse technical workforce. The program creates on-ramps for women and people of color – two groups that remain staggeringly underrepresented in today’s tech industry.
With 17 national locations, Per Scholas is able to contribute to the economic development of entire regions across the United States by delivering tuition-free technical training to thousands of new learners and partnering with hundreds of employers. Per Scholas connects graduates to a network of leading businesses, from AT&T and Bank of America to Google and Amazon. More than 14,000 learners have graduated from the program—earning, on average, four times more than their wages before enrolling.
Your contribution to Per Scholas helps off-set the cost of immersive training and career coaching learners need to succeed in today’s competitive, in-demand tech industry.For every $1 spent supporting Per Scholas, you are helping to generate $8 in net economic return.
Mentors Make A Difference
Every young person has incredible potential, all it takes is one person who cares. Big Brothers Big Sisters of America is the leading youth mentoring program that empowers kids in realizing their potential and building a plan for their future.
Big Brothers Big Sisters makes meaningful, professionally-supported matches between adult volunteers (“Bigs”) and youth (“Littles”), ages five through young adulthood in communities across the country. These positive one-to-one mentoring relationships have a direct and lasting effect on the lives of young people, helping them achieve higher aspirations, greater confidence and better relationships.
For over a century, Big Brothers Big Sisters has empowered young people and strengthened communities. Professional staff from the organization carefully build and support each match, striving for connections that are not only safe and well suited to each Little’s needs, but also harmonious and built to last.
To make the biggest impact, Big Brothers Big Sisters focuses on youth who need the most support—the vast majority of Littles come from underserved and underrepresented communities. The program operates in communities all across the United States—urban and rural, big and little. Their mentors work with young people in the community, in their schools, in workplace settings, on military bases, and many places in between.
The program works. Each year, Littles enrolled in the program complete the Youth Outcomes Survey to track progress in the areas of educational success, social-emotional competency, and avoidance of risky behaviors. The surveys show that 93 percent of Littles are saying no to drugs, violence and skipping school, 86 percent of Littles are staying on track with or improving their grades, and 90 percent of Littles see their Bigs as a very important adult in their life. These critical measurements are linked to life-changing long-term outcomes like graduating from college and finding a career.
When you volunteer with or donate to Big Brothers Big Sisters, you are investing in a kid’s future. Every contribution has a positive impact on the lives of young people in your community, and communities across the country.
Unlock Limitless Potential Through Reading
Ongoing COVID-related school disruptions have exacerbated existing inequities in the U.S. education system. When students can read on grade level by fourth grade, they become well-positioned to graduate from high school and access higher education. Unfortunately, studies show disproportionate levels of reading proficiency among White and economically privileged students who tend to have greater access to high-quality resources.
Reading Partners, a national non-profit, knows reading is foundational to all future learning. Reading Partners mobilizes community volunteers to fill the opportunity gap and provide students with one-on-one, twice-weekly tutoring sessions to help them achieve grade-level reading by fourth grade. With a proven program backed by evidence-based research, Reading Partners enlists teachers, parents, and community volunteers to create a support system that helps empower students to succeed and become strong, confident readers.
Over the past 22 years, Reading Partners has delivered more than 2.3 million tutoring sessions to nearly 70,000 students, engaging over 70,000 volunteer tutors. They work in 12 regions across the U.S. providing students from kindergarten to fifth grade in under-resourced schools with a proven, community-driven, individualized approach.
Reading Partners pivoted quickly during the pandemic to keep students and tutors safe by creating an online tutoring program, Reading Partners Connects, to ensure students’ learning needs continued to be met in unprecedented times. During the 2020-21 school year, Reading Partners delivered 110,914 tutoring sessions with 94 percent of sessions carried out online. More than 5,090 community volunteers received trainings on educational equity and social-emotional learning over the course of the year. And despite educational disruptions due to the pandemic, more than three quarters of all Reading Partners students met or exceeded their primary literacy growth goal.
Reading Partners is committed to improving equitable access and empowering students to overcome barriers. These barriers are far too often faced by students confronting economic hardships and/or systemic racial injustice. Volunteers empower students to build a strong academic base, leading to increased access and opportunities for success.
Your support can help Reading Partners reach their 2021-22 goal to serve thousands more students than last year. Become a volunteer or donate to help students unlock their limitless potential, one book at a time.
Focusing Philanthropy believes that donations should be made with the same level of strategic intent, information and confidence as other investments. To enable its generous donors to make these informed decisions, Focusing Philanthropy employs a rigorous methodology adapted from an investment model so it can confidently present high-impact, scalable giving opportunities that are off the radar but with extraordinary promise. Over $88 million has been deployed to date, and as a result, more than seven million people’s lives are being permanently and profoundly changed for the better.
Donors can take confidence in the process by which Focusing Philanthropy – itself a 501(c)3 nonprofit – identifies, evaluates, selects, monitors and reports on the programs and implementing partners it presents. These services are offered as a free resource; the founders of Focusing Philanthropy bear all the costs of its work so every dollar from others goes to its programs. Its curated giving menu targets serious human challenges such as achieving paths out of poverty, gaining access healthcare and education, and overcoming other barriers to unleash human potential. Donors can designate which of its programs they wish to support or leave the allocation to Focusing Philanthropy. Either way, all donations are tax deductible.
Focusing Philanthropy’s work begins with identifying areas of profound need affecting large numbers of people. Next, it seeks proven-successful intervention methods that are life changing and appropriate for private philanthropy. Applying a disciplined diligence process, Focusing Philanthropy then considers potential nonprofit implementing partners that show evidence of consistent results, not just activity. At the same time, it seeks confirmation of institutional capacity to productively deploy incremental dollars. This diligence involves visits to programs in the field, wherever in the world the work takes place.
Working with its nonprofit implementing partners, Focusing Philanthropy develops tailored giving opportunities specifically for its donors. This collaboration has led to over 100 unique initiatives and supporting campaigns over the past ten years.
Focusing Philanthropy continuously monitors its nonprofit partners institutionally and at the program level. This includes additional, regular field visits, often at different program sites. Focusing Philanthropy publishes its field reports and provides feedback to donors on actual results achieved with their support. If Focusing Philanthropy has material concerns about program results or institutional capacity or credibility, it no longer works with that partner.
The 2021 Holiday Impact Prize is Focusing Philanthropy’s fourth initiative in partnership with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Since 2019, the Holiday Impact Prize and the special edition C-19 Impact Initiative have raised over $21 million for featured organizations working to make the world a better place. Focusing Philanthropy coordinated each effort to help create a more ambitious campaign and ultimately increase donations. Its team continues to interact with recipient organizations to track and share campaign impact.
Now, Focusing Philanthropy is partnering with Kristof once again to play a similar role in the 2021 Holiday Impact Prize. Together, they hope to raise millions of dollars and recruit new volunteers for five extremely effective nonprofits.
Supporting little-known organizations working to make the world a better place
Since 2009, New York Times columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof has written an annual “holiday gift guide” column to bridge a philanthropic gap: readers who wanted to help but didn’t know how, and heroic individuals and organizations who desperately needed resources but were off donors’ radar. The column has helped raise the profiles of organizations that work on the very issues he covers in his journalism—health, education, human rights and women’s rights, both domestically and abroad.
For the third year, the guide continues to offer an exciting twist: a $150,000 Holiday Impact Prize that Kristof awards to the nonprofits he showcases. Kristof’s 2021 column highlights a $100,000 grand prize winner and two runners-up receiving $25,000 each, in addition to two volunteer opportunities with organizations changing their communities through service.
The 2021 Holiday Impact Prize is a call to action for others to join in supporting Kristof’s appeal. All funds raised by January 31, 2021 will be pooled so that these remarkable organizations can accomplish the impacts outlined below. And individuals expressing interest in volunteering will be linked to program representatives in their communities for follow-up.
Focusing Philanthropy is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that believes donations should be made with the same level of strategic intent, information, and confidence as other investments. The organization targets serious human challenges that individual donors can successfully address, chooses tactics that are demonstrably effective, identifies confidence-inspiring implementing partners, conducts ongoing monitoring, and assures substantive reporting. These services are provided free to both donors and partners in an effort to scale interventions that work. Donations are fully tax deductible, and Focusing Philanthropy covers all administrative costs and replenishes credit card transaction fees so that 100% of funds contributed go to implementing partners.
