But most of all, I think we love LADO because through LADO, we get to see the real American Dream unfolding before us, and the chance to play our small part in making sure that dream never dies.

This year, LADO awarded eighteen $1,000 scholarships to Latino college students from Rhode Island. It’s not a lot of money – unless you need a stethoscope for your nursing classes, like Marissa Laghana, who spoke at last night’s dinner. Or money for books or for travel home. It makes a difference – often it makes the vital difference between staying or leaving.

Marissa’s parents came to Rhode Island from Guatemala. Marissa was her family’s first high school graduate – and she’ll be their first college graduate, too. She knows what her parents struggled through to give her this chance and now she’s going to make their sacrifices worthwhile.

These 18 young men and women are talented, determined, directed. From this point onward they travel their separate paths to destinies they may only guess at today. For most, that future will include reaching back to help those coming along behind.

What strikes me now is the shared road they’ve traveled with their families to arrive at this night. For the families of our LADO scholars, that road starts somewhere in Latin America and travels through Pawtucket, Providence, Central Falls or Woonsocket, Rhode Island, but it’s a road Americans have traveled from every corner of the earth. For Gayle’s grandparents, that journey began in Portugal’s Azores Islands and led through the textile mills of New Bedford. My grandfather left Quebec before he was 13 years old to work in mills in Maine.

And for nearly every LADO scholar, as for our families, that path includes an education in the public schools that prepares them for college. We all know what’s very wrong with public schools, or think we do. But you only have to meet a LADO scholar to realize that there are some very good things – things essential to our democracy – happening in public schools, too. Maybe we should figure out what that is and bottle it.

And now the road approaches its reward – the completed destiny of the first child to graduate from college. The first child who will become not what they must be, but what they can dream of becoming – a teacher, an artist, a doctor – maybe the President of the United States. If this is a cliché, we need more clichés.

After a LADO dinner I’m farther than ever from understanding America’s anti-immigrant, anti-urban, anti-education anger. America needs these young men and women. We can’t afford for them not to realize their dreams – our dreams – the American Dream.

P.S. for Maritza Gomez, “our” Cause & Effect LADO scholar. We’re sorry your studies took you back to the University of Rochester before we could meet you. Best of luck with your studies and your ambition to help bilingual students.

You can find out more about LADO – and make a donation – at their website.

“Dear Jonathan and Gayle,

“In 1997 a man named Roger Whiting came to you with a story about a Tanzanian woman named Alice Mnaku, who dreamed of going to college but could not afford it. Thanks to your sage advice, Roger went on to found Growth Through Learning. It is lessons he learned from Cause & Effect that has enabled us to become the successful non-profit we are today. This year alone, GTL granted 317 scholarships to bright girls from poor families in East Africa….”

Roger Whiting was a retired insurance man from Worcester, Massachusetts. With no background in international development or education, Roger devised a simple and direct response to Africa’s poverty that has, in the years since 1997, also proven to be profoundly life-changing for hundreds of young women. We were sad to learn that Roger passed away in May of this year. But we are pleased and proud to know that we played a part in setting Growth Through Learning on the path to success.

Just like business start-ups, new nonprofits face an uphill struggle for survival and growth — and with far less access to start-up investment capital. Only yesterday, Gayle and I met a whole roomful of passionate volunteers and staff at the New Roots Providence consultant fair, many of them seeking guidance in their start-up processes.

What might this new generation  learn from a file we closed in 1997? We dug deep into Gayle’s hard drive and had a long talk with Alex Marthews to find out. Here are a few lessons in growth from Growth Through Learning:

1. Keep it simple. Growth Through Learning does one thing well: it pays fees at a few carefully selected secondary schools for girls from poor families in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The organization has generally avoided expanding the scope of its program or geographic area . With tremendous population growth predicted for all three program countries, running out of work is the least of GTL’s problems.

2. Tell real stories. Two stories really matter here. One is the story of an African girl whose life is transformed by education. The other is the story of an American whose own life is changed by compassion. Alice and Roger were the first characters in this story, but there have been hundreds of girls and donors since then. GTL staff or volunteers personally collect the story of every single girl during annual visits. This story is both familiar and totally new each time it is told.

3. Keep it personal. Roger’s generosity of spirit  and his enthusiasm burned bright. By sharing his story face to face, starting from his personal network of friends, Roger patiently built a widening circle of loyal donors and board members that slowly but steadily enabled him to expand scholarships from just a handful of girls helped, to dozens, and now hundreds, every year.

4. Make your own luck. No one could have predicted two game-changing gifts that came to Growth Through Learning, including a $1 million bequest that has essentially solved the problem of paying GTL’s current very lean overhead. But we could easily predict that they would never have come about without Roger’s persistent effort at steps 1, 2 and 3 above.

Our thanks to Alex Marthews for taking the time to contact us and share those learnings and also for honoring Cause & Effect, with a link to the Growth Through Learning site.  I’ll revisit what Alex shared about the uses of stories in a later posting.

It turned out that Lorén was OK, but the school wasn’t. FEMA won’t help pay for the extensive damage it suffered. The loss of the bridge was a final blow, limiting access to a dirt road in poor condition for at least the next two years. I got Lorén’s email announcing a two-year hiatus for Nuweetooun this morning. Rather than mourn, I want to celebrate the seven years that this improbable institution served its community so well.

The Nuweetooun vision was challenging from the beginning: create an accredited, private, alternative K-8 school serving Native children and drawing on Native knowledge, history and values to inform a rigorous science and literacy curriculum. Actually, that was the easy part. At least Lorén made it look easy. It was definitely fun.

The hard part was paying for it. Tuition collections fell far short of costs, so the difference was made up with grants, a little bit of earned money and some individual contributions. Even then, there was always another bill to pay.

Yet, this exciting little two-room school in the woods has flourished educationally for seven years, and so have its Native students. How? Because of the inspired labor of love provided by Lorén as master teacher and by her extended circles of family and friends. Hundreds and probably thousands of hours of unpaid work, infinite patience on the rent money and the chipped-in services of craftspeople and others made it possible to hang on from year to year.

Sure, that’s no way to run a business, but Nuweetooun never has been a business and never needed to be. It has been a circle of people helping each other create something wonderful. I hope and expect that something wonderful will happen again and that we’ll see a new bridge on Roaring Brook and new students at Nuweetooun in two years or so.

“Together we must learn to live together or we will perish as fools…

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. … There is … nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family…”

” … Our only hope today lies in our ability to … go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism …

“… We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now … Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’ ”

From: “The World House“ chapter in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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Some of you may have seen the “60 Minutes” program Congo’s Gold that aired November 29, 2009. The story detailed how the selling of “conflict minerals” such as gold are paying for the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). With almost five million dead, this war has been described as the deadliest war since WWII.

Amnesty International USA describes this as a ” ‘war against women’ where “women and girls are being raped in great numbers as a means of destroying their families and communities.”

What seems so far away and removed from our lives came to us up close Sunday when Congolese refugee Albert Mulenda Rajabu spoke about his experiences in the DRC at the Write-a-Thon for Human Rights sponsored by Group 49 of Amnesty International USA.

Mr. Rajabu, a former teacher,  stoically shared his own story of surviving two civil wars despite arrest and jailing for his human rights work in the DRC. But he wept when he reported incidences of sexual violence perpetrated against women and girls. He shared with the room the following story of a survivor’s account of the sexual violence. (Warning: the letter is graphic.)

“As you requested, here is my story:

“It was in August 2008 when I and my children (two daughters, aged 17 and 14, and my 12 year old son) were going to cultivate our field.

“On the way, we were surprised by three gunmen in military uniform. While pointing their guns at us, they commanded us to stop, throw away our tools, and to lie down.

“My son started running, screaming and crying for help. One of the gunmen caught him in his run and hit him in the head with the point of his gun, seriously injuring him.

“It was then they started raping us with atrocity, my daughters and I. One of the gunmen held my son’s face toward us so that he could see us being sexually violated.

“Afterward they left, taking our clothes and leaving us naked. We had to wait for dark to get home.

“We were taken to the nearest health center two miles away but for lack of money the treatment we received was not enough to cure our injuries.

“My 14 year old daughter who had two men on her is till bleeding heavily. My son ran away from home to an unknown destination. My husband divorced me because, according to him, we were left with diseases and have a curse on us.

“Now we are living in such a bad situation that we cannot move from home to continue our daily activities, being afraid following what happened.”

It grieves us to share this letter and we debated long and hard whether to do so. Unfortunately, generalizations about hundreds of women and girls being raped has failed to move enough people to action. Perhaps the voice of this one woman, sent across the ocean, will touch your heart and move you to do at least one small thing to help women and girls in the DRC.

How you can help.

One place to start is to download the AIUSA action packet: No Excuses, No Delay. Protect civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  In the packet you’ll find some sample letters, including one asking that the President of the DRC ensure the safety of  another woman, Justine Masika Bihamba, who has been threatened and her children attacked for her human rights work. She is the coordinator for the women’s human rights organization Synergie des femmes contre les violences sexuelles (SFVS).

At the Write-a-Thon, we sent our appeal for the safety of Justine Masika Bihamba, and on behalf of all civilians in the DRC.

Please spread the word. It is the least that we can do.

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 1964

“A fair prosperity and a just society are within our vision and our grasp, and we do not have every answer. There are questions not yet asked, waiting for us in the recesses of the future, but of this much we can be certain because it is the lesson of all our history: Together a president and the people can make a difference. I have found that faith still alive wherever I have traveled across this land. So let us reject the counsel of retreat and the call to reaction. Let us go forward in the knowledge that history only helps those who help themselves.

“There will be setbacks and sacrifices in the years ahead but I am convinced that we as a people are ready to give something back to our country in return for all it has given to us.

“Let this be our commitment: Whatever sacrifices must be made will be shared and shared fairly. And let this be our confidence: At the end of our journey and always before us shines that ideal of liberty and justice for all.”

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention 1980

Congratulations, President Barack Obama. The hopes and dreams of the world’s people rest with you today and throughout your presidency.  Courage. While there is much to do, there are many who are willing to help if asked.