RESULTS Portland

Welcome

Extending An Opportunity to Change Lives?—Will You Take It?

If somebody offered you a chance to help put 75 million kids in primary school who would otherwise grow up illiterate, would you take it? If someone gave you an opportunity to put small business loans in the hands of 175 million of the world's poorest people, would you want to be a part of that? These are the kind of opportunities that volunteers for RESULTS will be offering community members around the country on October 17 at their National Outreach?—Stand Up Event.

You might ask yourself how an organization you may never have heard of be so bold? It is based on their track record.

RESULTS is citizen advocacy organization that has been fighting poverty and bridging the gap between people and government for 28 years. In the late 80s RESULTS saw the power of microcredit in Bangladesh and introduced a little-known figure named Muhammad Yunus to members of Congress and the media. RESULTS advocates educated their members of Congress on the power of microfinance and requested that the US invest foreign assistance dollars into microfinance programs around the globe. RESULTS founder Sam Daley Harris then worked with John Hatch, the founder of FINCA, and Muhammad Yunus to create the Microcredit Summit Campaign (MCS). The MCS set an audacious goal of reaching 100 million of the world's poorest with microcredit over a 10-year period. In January of 2009 MCS announced that 106 million people living on less than $1 per day had microloans in 2007. This is up from only 8 million microcredit borrowers in 1997. MCS and RESULTS have set a new goal of reaching 175 million of the world's poorest with microcredit by 2015, with the added goal that 100 million borrowers lift themselves, and their families, above the absolute poverty line.

RESULTS also saw promise in providing simple vaccinations and oral rehydration therapy to children under age 5, and was instrumental in creating the US Child Survival Account. During the time that RESULTS has been working on child survival, the number of children under age 5 dying each day of preventable causes has dropped from 41,000 per day in the 80s, to 24,000 today, even as the global population has increased. RESULTS now has bold plans for the 75 million primary-school age children who do not have access to school.

RESULTS' work is not easy. We start by providing the ''missing education'' to citizens who see poverty in the world and don't know what to do about it, but just cannot sit by and watch it any longer. The missing education we provide has two parts. The first is to educate citizens on the problems of poverty and their solutions, and the second is to give people the skills to get their elected officials to act on the solutions. Many people are cynical about politics, thinking that it doesn't matter, or thinking that they cannot make a difference. RESULTS has proven over and over that citizen involvement does matter, and that politicians, even the toughest of them, do listen when we take the time to get to know them, educate them, and remain persistent with them.