Spreading Awareness for Education, Animal Rights

By: Rashmi

Rashmi is a participant in Allowance for Good's Winter 2015 Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy: Explorers class. 

I recently watched a video of 17 year old Malala Yousafzai at the UN Youth Assembly. Her steady voice delivered words of wisdom and advice, trying to inspire the youth in front of her. I found her speech interesting and inspiring in several different ways. She made a point to not offend anyone, and spoke about how obstacles should not stop people from doing what is right. I thought it was brave of her to stand in front of so many people and talk about such a controversial topic. All of the statements she made were positive, or ended on a positive note. She had something nice to say about everyone and everything. She spoke of the positive impact people could have on the world by using kindness instead of violence, and how no one should be denied their right to education. She was very passionate about it, and talked about how opposition from others did not stop her from going to school. 

The amount of time she talked about spending advocating the right to education and the dangers she had faced opened my eyes to how many problems there are in the world and how much work it will take to fix them. I am very passionate about animals, and spend time volunteering at shelters over the weekend. Some people believe that animals are not important, and that they don’t matter. However, I think that they are just as important as people, and believe that it is important to protest animal cruelty. 

One way I can raise awareness about this issue is by talking to friends and my community and letting them know that there are problems that need to be solved and more than one person is needed to do it. I can also raise money to help larger organizations who are already combatting this problem. This is related to our Global Awareness project because we are trying to open people’s eyes to the things that happen around us that could be improved if everyone donated their time and efforts to the cause. I can use the project to help others understand what needs to be fixed.

Rashmi, front left, with some of her ELP classmates.

Hungry for Human Rights

By: Kate

Kate is a participant in Allowance for Good's Winter 2015 Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy: Explorers class. 

In this week’s ELP class we talked about many different human rights and what we have to do to protect those rights. We talked about our roles in helping protect these human rights and how we can help create a better nation. We also talked about our nation’s agenda for the future and how so many things that we planned to be done by 2015 aren’t done and seem to be going nowhere. We made agenda’s for the UN on more logical and attainable goals for the future and how they can make those succeed, while also trying to see how we can attain the goals already set.

One human right that I specifically am very passionate about is hunger in America today. I have been involved with this cause deeply because my mother works for the non-profit organization Feeding America so I get a lot of facts spit out at me about hunger in the US. From this information from my mother and personally seeing what is going on, it saddens me but also makes me inspired to do more to help this cause.

This cause is very important to me and inspires me because we spend so much time thinking about other places and people when our own people are suffering. We give money to others when they are in need yet we don’t see what is going within our own borders. I feel that everyone should have the basic knowledge of what is going on in our country and that people we can see on a daily basis are suffering.

I have done many bake sales and food drives to help support this cause but I would like to do more hands-on work in the future. I feel like donating money is such an easy way to help and that it can go such a long way, but even then you don’t truly see where your money is going and who it is going to help. I plan to work in more food pantries, packing meals, so I can truly see who these people are and where my help is going to.

Kate writes, "I am a Catalyst for Good because everybody deserves to have their basic human rights."