It's Not Just Oprah, As Many Join The Private Foreign Aid Effort

WASHINGTON — Talk show superstar Oprah Winfrey has a new $40 million school for girls in South Africa. Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda oversee their $32 billion endowment for health clinics and scholarships in more than 100 countries.

But it's not just the rich and famous who are running this privately financed foreign aid movement.

Growing numbers of Americans — teachers, carpenters, corporate employees and retirees — are going on Internet sites to give money and sometimes to find ways to volunteer for projects to combat poverty around the world.

Not content to write a check to a large international charity, these donors often choose tiny enterprises where a few hundred dollars can make a life-changing difference for recipients.

Helene Dudley, who by day is an official with the Port of Miami, helps run the Colombia Project in her off hours. The private effort, started in 2000, gives "micro" loans to families left destitute by the guerrilla wars in Colombia.

Dudley, a former Peace Corps volunteer who travels to South America to help oversee the project, said the loans could be for something as simple as pots and pans to cook meals for sale outside a church.

In one case, a teenage boy had fled to Santa Marta, Colombia, to escape pressure to join the guerrillas.

The U.S. group gave him money to buy a portable clothes washing machine, which he hooked up to a bicycle and took house to house. In a city with no laundromats, he earned enough money to repay his loan and put himself through college.

"It's the equivalent of giving a man a fishing pole and teaching him to fish" instead of just giving him a fish, Dudley said. Loan repayment is about 70-75 percent.

In Austin, Texas, a group of volunteers reach across the border to a poverty-stricken neighborhood in Rio Bravo.

"Some people really want to be able to participate themselves," said Julia Foree, a former Peace Corps volunteer who with her husband, Rob, helps run Amigos de las Esquelas (Friends of the Schools).

The organization, which brings volunteers to the Mexican neighborhood every Thanksgiving and spring break, has helped build a school, a private kindergarten and a community center.

The effort also fosters self-help, said Foree. The group hired a local social worker to run the community center, where donated clothing from the States is sold. But there's a catch. The only way to make a purchase is to rack up "community points," by picking up trash in the playground or tutoring children.

An Atlanta couple, Tom Arsenault and Elizabeth Bara, found they loved working on development projects in Africa when they were serving in the Peace Corps in the 1980s. They decided to set up their own organization to encourage self-reliance in Zimbabwe.

After more than a decade of building the program, the couple turned over the Africa operations to Zimbabweans and returned to the United States to raise money from their Peachtree City, Ga., headquarters.

"I think our organization is stronger than it has ever been," Bara said of their nonprofit, ASAP Africa. The program runs savings clubs to help small businesses, training for math teachers, counseling for HIV affected households, and advice on cost effective farming.

After Bara gave a speech at Sandy Creek High School in suburban Tyrone, Ga., the students responded with a car-wash and jeans sale that netted a check for $933 to ASAP Africa.

"It's much different from giving a donation to an organization that's so big that you don't feel you're having an impact," Bara said.

Her organization is among those featured on GlobalGiving.com, an Internet site launched by two former World Bank executives in 2000 to give the public an opportunity to click and donate directly to development projects.

"What Bill Gates is doing and what Oprah's doing has called attention to the impact of private donations," said Joan Ochi, spokeswoman for GlobalGiving.com. She added that with sites such this one, "anybody can be a philanthropist."

"Obviously the dollar goes a long in a rural developing country," Ochi said. "We have a lot of projects on our site where $40 can pay for a girl to go to school."

GlobalGiving, which charges a 10 percent fee to the groups, provides safeguards by checking out the projects through partners such as the World Bank.

Last year, GlobalGiving received $2 million for development projects, Ochi said. That's about the same total as the year before, but it represents a doubling of donations to development projects, since most of the 2005 donations were for emergency relief from the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, she said.

At the same time, the Internet has made volunteering abroad easier. The group Action Without Borders reports major growth in its Internet-based listings, with 58,000 nonprofit groups posting job and volunteer opportunities.

Corporations that are already part of the global marketplace are also joining the movement. The outdoors clothing company Timberland and the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. offer their employees sabbaticals to work for nonprofit programs overseas.

It is difficult to estimate how many Americans have joined the private foreign aid effort. The Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., research and policy center, last year estimated that 50,000 Americans were volunteering for development projects abroad.

Brookings has formed a coalition of non-profit groups that recently pledged to double the volunteer ranks to 100,000 over the next three years.

David Caprara, who is directing the Brookings initiative, said the presence of American volunteers overseas is a matter of national security. He cited polls that show pro-American sentiments have spiked upward and support for terrorists has dropped in Asian areas that saw American aid arrive after the Tsunami disaster.

"Volunteers really are the best face of our country," Caprara said.