One man's mission....with a win-win outcome

It doesn't necessarily take an organisation or lots of money to change perceptions, educate or raise money.

Nicholas Kristof, op-ed columnist for the NY Times explains in a piece "Win a Trip You Won’t Forget" how one man, he himself, has been able to change things for the better with a win-win outcome:

"A few years ago, soon after I returned disconsolate and shellshocked from a trip to Darfur, I found New Yorkers burning with moral outrage.

The spark wasn’t genocide, war or poverty, but rather homelessness — of a red-tailed hawk nicknamed Pale Male. Managers of a Fifth Avenue apartment building had dismantled his nest.

Fury! Television cameras! And public pressure that led to a solution for rebuilding the nest.

I wondered how some of that compassion for a hawk could be rechanneled to help human beings like those I had just seen dying in Darfur. The potential is vast: just imagine if we felt the same sympathy for the 25,000 children who will die today of poverty as we do for, say, a lost and terrified puppy on the street. But it’s very difficult to generate activism for distant people whom we can’t visualize.

So I concocted a contest to take a university student with me on a reporting trip to Africa. I figured that the student’s journey might help connect American students to truly desperate needs abroad.

We’ve held two of these student trips so far, and today I’m delighted to announce the third."

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