Helping Humanity Helps the Environment - It Feels Good Too.

The 2007 annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative focused its efforts on four areas of concern: education, energy and climate change, global health, and poverty alleviation.

It seems to me that doing something in any one of these areas will help the other. We learn in both human relations and the environment the interconnectedness of things.

When I was reading about the meeting earlier this month, I discovered a site, called Kiva.org, that enables people like you and me to help fund microloans to entreprenuers in developing countries as they work to lifting themselves and their families out of poverty.

I signed up for the site a few weeks ago, but didn’t do any more than that.

Then, just this past weekend, I was idlely surfing through websites on my StumbleUpon account and came across the GlobalRichList.

Essentially, the GlobalRichList asks you to input your yearly income and compares that with the rest of the world. I am most decidedly NOT a rich man in terms that you and I are acustomed to. I like to tell people that I “eek out a living”, but how could I say that to someone living on a dollar a day or less?

In any case, when I found out that, in terms of world averages, my income rests comfortably within the top 1%, it got me to thinking how fortunate I really am, and due to no inordinate effort on my part.

I then remembered my signup on Kiva.org and decided to do a little more. After searching through several loan requests, I settled on two, with plans on adding one or two more every time I get a paycheck or someone pays an invoice for my writing work.

$25 or $50 will go a long way in helping to lift a family out of poverty, and it is a loan, so the money is repaid in any case. But that’s not really the point. Helping someone in need is.

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Helping Humanity Helps the Environment - It Feels Good Too.

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