Oct. 18, 2012

By Charles R. Ostertag

During Give2Asia’s 10th Anniversary Forum, the founder and director of Friends International, Sebastien Marot, explained his dissatisfaction: five-hundred million children are pushed to the margins of the world, the numbers keep increasing, and traditional charity models do not work because the charity dollars have been increasing, as well. These children have little or no choice but a life of extreme poverty, crime, and/or prostitution, which is often mixed with drug use. Additionally, these children frequently have families who live in similar conditions and face the same hardships.

However, despite Mr. Marot’s dissatisfaction, his organization strives for a fundamental goal: turn children into productive members of the societies in which they live. Friends International has four core programs that holistically work to do just that.

1. Friends Programs are run by Friends International itself. While the needs of each child differs, the common affect of the program stabilizes the child, perform harm reduction, and gives the child marketable vocational skills, confidence, and support to pull themselves out of poverty and create a better life. It is a holistic approach to rebuilding childhood and instilling a sense of self-respect and humanity. A case manager is assigned to each child and the child is also enrolled in an educational program and vocational center to learn job skills. Drop-in centers are established in the city giving children opportunities to eat, rest, and communicate with social workers. These programs also seek to give back some of the childhood that has been lost due to marginalization by incorporating play, physical activities, games, and teachings on the significance of the child’s country history and culture

Friends International also understands that if one child is rehabilitated, the risk of relapse is high if the community or close family ties also remain impoverished. While constant follow-up is performed on the child, Friends International also works with the child’s entire family and address their needs, thereby building a support network among family members. The ultimate goal in this context give the family the skills and healing they need to support themselves. In 2011, Friends International worked with 27,000 street children. Mr. Marot expressed this is but a small drop in the ocean of 500 million children.

2. Child Safe Network focuses on community oversight and alleviating the negative affect tourists and travelers can have on marginalized populations in the countries in which they travel. Mr. Marot explained that if people don’t know what to do (or what not to do), when they try to help, they can in fact do harm. For example, giving money to street children seems like a good idea but it actually encourages children to stay out of school or other beneficial program to seek the money that can be made by begging.

The Child Safe Network also trains key people in targeted communities to recognize and identify at-risk children and intervene on the child’s behalf.

3. City Alliance builds upon models created by Friends International and replicates them through partnership with other NGOs. Mr. Marot expressed that Friends International strives to be a “responsive organization,” and not like a oceanic shipping tanker, slow and lumbering. In 2011, Friends International and its 28 partners worked with sixty thousand street children across many different countries.

4. TREE Alliance addresses the problem of funding and donor continuity. Working with a child takes 4-5 years and few donors wish to fund a particular child or project for that long. In response, Friends International has created local businesses that generate money for their programs. These businesses have made programs 54% sustainable in Phnom Penh and are expanding to other areas.

Intertwined with the goal of making each child a productive member of their society is the objective of vast program replication and expansion at the State level. To this end, Friends International instills a proof-of-concept model such that the government cannot help but adopt it into policy whereby replication becomes automatic.

Recently, Friends International was featured on PBS NewsHour. Watch the story below.

Sebastien Marot, founder of Friends International will be speaking at Give2Asia’s 10th anniversary event this fall on replicating successful charitable models in multiple countries. Read more about Marot, Friends International and Give2Asia’s 10th anniversary celebration by clicking here.

From the New York Times:

There were no significant reports of casualties or significant damage, and the tsunami warnings were called off hours after they were widely broadcast on television, mobile phones and the Internet.

The first quake, which was measured at 8.6 by the United States Geological Survey, was felt across a large area. In addition to Indonesia, tremors were felt in Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.

In what ultimately amounted to a test of the region’s tsunami warning systems, residents fled coastal areas for higher ground. In Banda Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra, the hurried, spontaneous evacuation came after several minutes of heavy shaking.

Read the rest of the story from the New York Times, by clicking here.

“There are going to be more such frequent natural disasters and they will complicate the challenge of achieving sustainable development in Asia,” Lohani said. ”As the region’s economies become increasingly linked through commercial supply chains… the impacts of such disasters are no longer confined to the place of occurrence but have wider regional and local impacts,” he said.

Read the full story from the Economic Times, here. 

Click cover image to download report (PDF 1.1Mb).

In October 2010 Indonesia was devastated by two disasters. On Oct. 26, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck near the Mentawai Islands off the coast of Sumatra and triggered a devastating tsunami, killing over 400 people and destroying 10 coastal villages. That same week, Mount Merapi, in central Java, began a long series of violent eruptions, killing another 353 people. Together, the two disasters forced nearly 400,000 people to evacuate their homes, many of which were destroyed.

Immediately following the disasters, Give2Asia opened the 2010 Indonesia Earthquake and Volcanic Eruption Fund. Since then, Give2Asia has collected and granted out over $200,000 to relief, recovery and future disaster preparedness. Projects include: construction of permanent water reservoirs, reclamation of agricultural land, operation of camps for internally displaced people, and supply of mobile medical units.

Local need still persists; therefore, Give2Asia will keep the 2010 Indonesia Earthquake and Volcanic Eruption Fund open and will accept new donations for response. New grants will be made to our local partners as funds allow.

Give2Asia has been a leader in disaster response philanthropy to Asia since 2004.

Read the full report here.

In the Asia-Pacific region one challenge that must be faced is rising sea levels, which in Bangladesh alone will claim 11 percent of the land and affect 15 million people by 2050. In China, smog and pollution are already responsible for 300,000 premature deaths and 20 million cases of respiratory illness each year, according to the report.

But not all the news is bad. According to the same report, four Asian nations  – China, India, Vietnam and Bhutan — have reversed deforestation and begun replenishing their forest acreage.

William Orme, a spokesman for the UN Agency, in an interview with the New York Times, said:

“Even if someone’s a climate skeptic, this report says, ‘Put that aside for a second.’ If you believe in something like a moral commitment to the global community and in getting people out of poverty, we must address these environmental issues.”

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT 

The full report is available from the United Nations here. Or, you can read the New York Times summary, here.

Asian philanthropy has grown dramatically during the past decade, attracting considerable attention both within Asia and globally. Previously of interest primarily to a small number of advocates and researchers, the growing scale and the promise of Asian philanthropy have recently drawn the attention of major banks, private wealth advisers and business journals. Within just the past three months, for example, excellent reports on the state of philanthropy in Asia have been published by the Economist Intelligence Unit and UBS, while an invitation-only conference was organized for major philanthropists in the US by Credit Suisse.

Reflecting these trends, the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium (APPC), a regional philanthropy research and advocacy organization based in Hong Kong, and Give2Asia, a San Francisco-based facilitator of charitable donations from the United States to non-profit causes and organizations in Asia, announced their merger earlier this week. Both organizations have long shared the goal of increasing the flow and effectiveness of philanthropic giving within and to Asia. APPC focused its efforts on developing philanthropic infrastructure within Asia, while Give2Asia has worked for the past decade to make charitable giving from the US easier, safer and more effective.

Established in December 1994 after a series of regional research conferences, APPC focused its research, conferencing and training on four core challenges facing the growth of philanthropy and the non-profit sector in Asia: improving the legal and regulatory environment; increasing public awareness and support for philanthropy and the non-profit sector; facilitating financial resource mobilization within and for Asia; and strengthening human resources for the development of philanthropic organizations. Its major accomplishments include the first comparative studies of the legal and regulatory framework governing the non-profit sector in 15 Asian countries, the first systematic survey of fundraising and charitable giving at the household level in seven Asian countries, organizing and supporting numerous study tours for Asian government and non-profit leaders, philanthropists and scholars; and sponsoring international conferences and dialogues on topics such as corporate community engagement, post-tsunami disaster relief and preparedness; and improving governance in the non-profit sector. APPC also sponsored fundraising and financial sustainability training in cooperation with Philippine Business for Social Responsibility (PBSP) and Venture for Fund Raising, a Manila-based non-profit consulting firm spun off from APPC.

Give2Asia is a philanthropic service organization that facilitates charitable giving to Asia by individuals, foundations and corporations in the US. Give2Asia offers donors unparalleled country-specific expertise on local needs and non-profit organizations (including community organizations, NGOs, universities, museums, health and medical facilities) throughout Asia, conducts in-depth due diligence, manages funds, and provides regular reports to donors. Since its creation in 2001, Give2Asia has distributed $177 million in grants to qualified Asian non-profit organizations and charitable causes. About 36% has been granted to organizations in China, 29% in India, 20% in Southeast Asia, 6% elsewhere in South Asia, and the balance in Australia, Japan, Korea and New Zealand. In terms of subject areas, 34% has gone to education, 27% to health care, 14% to disaster response, 10% to social welfare services, and 5% to environmental causes.

The merger of APPC and Give2Asia creates a new resource for donors in Asia and the US. APPC’s research and conference reports have been digitized and are available for free download at Give2Asia’s new website, www.asianphilanthropy.org. APPC was led by a board of directors consisting of some of Asia’s most expert and committed practitioners and advocates for philanthropy. Most of them will be part of Give2Asia’s new Asian Philanthropy Advisory Network (APA Network), which will enable Give2Asia to offer even more in-depth advisory services, including understanding country contexts, legal frameworks, strategic planning and impact assessment to philanthropic donors whether they live in Asia or the US. Give2Asia will also be publishing regular reports on the state of philanthropy in specific Asian countries in the months and years ahead, with many of those reports written by members of the APA Network.

The growth and spread of philanthropy in Asia is amazing to behold, with so many philanthropists and innovative and effective non-profit organizations emerging across the region. Yet much work remains to be done to sustain these happy trends. Among the greatest needs are improving the legal and regulatory frameworks in some countries to make it easier for non-profits to obtain approved legal status; improving transparency and accountability among new Asian donor foundations and non-profit recipients; creating or increasing tax incentives for charitable giving by donors large and small; professionalizing the philanthropic field through training for CEOs, program officers, accountants, and even trustees; providing opportunities for peer-to-peer learning and to observe best practices elsewhere; and educating the media and the public to better understand the role of philanthropy in societies in which government has traditionally been expected to provide public goods and services. Unfortunately, the philanthropic sector still receives most attention only when spectacular acts occur, either in the form of unusual donor generosity or the scandalous behavior of a few non-profit organizations.

Give2Asia is a service organization focused primarily on assisting donors to realize their philanthropic agendas. We will continue to have that as our top priority, but in the years ahead, based in part on the pioneering work of APPC, we will also work with partners in Asia to build the capacity and effectiveness of the philanthropic sector itself. Over time, contributing to building strong, effective, well-managed and transparent non-profit organizations in Asia is the greatest service we can provide for our donors.

Barnett Baron is currently president and CEO of Give2Asia. He was founding chairman of APPC from 1994 to 2005; he was also a member of The Asia Foundation team that created Give2Asia in 2001. He can be reached by email at bbaron@give2asia.org.

Asia Value Advisors released a report titled “Impact Investing in Asia: From Definition to Pathways to Scale via Impact Giving.” The research brief seeks to bring philanthropic stakeholders together under common issues and philanthropic dialogue in order to promote impact investing.

To read the full report, click here.