5 Most Recent Articles
- Our Teen Philanthropist
- New Product Bytes are on the Enthiosys Site
- Grocers and Chefs: Software Service Models
- Service Revenue and Upsell Marketing
- Burning Your Boats
Topical Index »
Search
Our Teen Philanthropist
San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, July 14, 2008
The new philanthropists: Silicon Valley teens
Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer
A group of Kenyan orphans is tasting milk for the first time. On a train platform in India, teachers are giving lessons to children whose families force them to beg from passengers. And in Thailand, health workers are showing Burmese refugees how reduce their chances of contracting HIV. All three projects are largely funded by Bay Area students.
Meet the new philanthropists - Silicon Valley teens with innate computer networking skills, affluent family connections and the one-click ability to bear witness to global poverty. “Their sense of justice is different than ours growing up,” said Sue Schwartzman of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund, whose youth foundation gave away $204,000 in global charity in June. A portion funded the train station schools in India.
“I think a lot of Bay Area kids understand that their lives are great and when they see these pictures from around the world it’s not OK. They want to make other young people’s lives OK, too,” Schwartzman said....
Sasha Mironov: Camera is a lens on world poverty
By the time she was 15, Sasha Mironov of San Mateo had helped fund a well in Chad for Darfur refugees and an after-school program in Israel to bring Arab and Jewish children together. Closer to home, she raised money for the Bread Project in Berkeley, a culinary training program for low-income and unemployed people. She raised $8,000 in all, by writing letters to family friends.
“I feel I’m personally making a difference in the world, even as a teenager,” she said. “When I started this, I couldn’t even drive.” Well she’s behind the wheel now, and her fundraising has also speeded up. Last summer, she took a photo excursion to Thailand through an eco-travel teen program, Rustic Pathways. What she captured through her lens broke her heart. Burmese refugees, living in huts made of leaves, with no electricity, no running water and no toilets.
“I was struck by how friendly the people were and how much they enjoyed life but also by how much their lives could be improved,” she said. Back home, she contacted the American Jewish World Service, which helped her find the Shan Women’s Action Network, which runs three medical clinics providing prenatal and pediatric care in Burmese refugee camps. Mironov had a new cause. By the time she finished her junior year at San Francisco’s Lick-Wilmerding High School in May, she had collected another $4,000 and sent it to Burma. This summer, she’s going on another photo excursion to India. She can’t promise she’ll come home with only photos. “What I feel is necessary to be a good human is to go out and help the world,” she said.