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For the last two weeks I’ve been posting the Top 20 Motivation Hacks, one by one. These are the tips and tricks that, if used in combination, are a nearly sure way to achieve your goals.

Achieving goals is not a matter of having “discipline”. It’s a matter of motivating yourself, and keeping your focus on your goal. Follow these hacks, or any combination of them that works for you, and you should have the motivation and focus you need.

Here they are, in reverse order (links take you to more on each):

#20: Chart Your Progress. Recently I posted about how I created a chart to track my progress with each of my goals. This chart is not just for information purposes, for me to look back and see how I’m doing. It’s to motivate me to keep up with my goals. If I’m diligent about checking my chart every day, and marking dots or “x”s, then I will want to make sure I fill it with dots. I will think to myself, “I better do this today if I want to mark a dot.” Well, that’s a small motivation, but it helps, trust me. Some people prefer to use gold stars. Others have a training log, which works just as well. Or try Joe’s Goals. However you do it, track your progress, and allow yourself a bit of pride each time you give yourself a good mark.

Now, you will have some bad marks on your chart. That’s OK. Don’t let a few bad marks stop you from continuing. Strive instead to get the good marks next time.

#19: Hold Yourself Back. When I start with a new exercise program, or any new goal really, I am rarin’ to go. I am full of excitement, and my enthusiasm knows no boundaries. Nor does my sense of self-limitation. I think I can do anything. It’s not long before I learn that I do have limitations, and my enthusiasm begins to wane.

Well, a great motivator that I’ve learned is that when you have so much energy at the beginning of a program, and want to go all out — HOLD BACK. Don’t let yourself do everything you want to do. Only let yourself do 50-75 percent of what you want to do. And plan out a course of action where you slowly increase over time. For example, if I want to go running, I might think I can run 3 miles at first. But instead of letting myself do that, I start by only running a mile. When I’m doing that mile, I’ll be telling myself that I can do more! But I don’t let myself. After that workout, I’ll be looking forward to the next workout, when I’ll let myself do 1.5 miles. I keep that energy reined in, harness it, so that I can ride it even further.

#18: Join an online (or off-line) group to help keep you focused and motivated. When I started to run, more than a year ago, I joined a few different forums, at different times, on different sites, such as Men’s Health (the Belly-Off Runner’s Club), Runner’s World, Cool Running, and the running group at About.com. I did the same when I was quitting smoking.

Each time I joined a forum, it helped keep me on track. Not only did I meet a bunch of other people who were either going through what I was going through or who had already been through it, I would report my progress (and failures) as I went along. They were there for great advice, for moral support, to help keep me going when I wanted to stop.

#17: Post a picture of your goal someplace visible — near your desk or on your refrigerator, for example. Visualizing your goal, exactly how you think it will be when you’ve achieved it, whether it’s financial goals like traveling to Rome or building a dream house, or physical goals like finishing a marathon or getting a flat stomach, is a great motivator and one of the best ways of actualizing your goals.

Find a magazine photo or a picture online and post it somewhere where you can see it not only daily, but hourly if possible. Put it as your desktop photo, or your home page. Use the power of your visual sense to keep you focused on your goal. Because that focus is what will keep you motivated over the long term — once you lose focus, you lose motivation, so having something to keep bringing your focus back to your goal will help keep that motivation.

#16: Get a workout partner or goal buddy. Staying motivated on your own is tough. But if you find someone with similar goals (running, dieting, finances, etc.), see if they’d like to partner with you. Or partner with your spouse, sibling or best friend on whatever goals they’re trying to achieve. You don’t have to be going after the same goals — as long as you are both pushing and encouraging each other to succeed.

#15: Just get started. There are some days when you don’t feel like heading out the door for a run, or figuring out your budget, or whatever it is you’re supposed to do that day for your goal. Well, instead of thinking about how hard it is, and how long it will take, tell yourself that you just have to start.

I have a rule (not an original one) that I just have to put on my running shoes and close the door behind me. After that, it all flows naturally. It’s when you’re sitting in your house, thinking about running and feeling tired, that it seems hard. Once you start, it is never as hard as you thought it would be. This tip works for me every time.

#14: Make it a pleasure. One reason we might put off something that will help us achieve our goal, such as exercise for example, is because it seems like hard work. Well, this might be true, but the key is to find a way to make it fun or pleasurable. If your goal activity becomes a treat, you actually look forward to it. And that’s a good thing.

#13: Give it time, be patient. I know, this is easier said than done. But the problem with many of us is that we expect quick results. When you think about your goals, think long term. If you want to lose weight, you may see some quick initial losses, but it will take a long time to lose the rest. If you want to run a marathon, you won’t be able to do it overnight. If you don’t see the results you want soon, don’t give up … give it time. In the meantime, be happy with your progress so far, and with your ability to stick with your goals. The results will come if you give it time.

#12: Break it into smaller, mini goals. Sometimes large or longer-term goals can be overwhelming. After a couple weeks, we may lose motivation, because we still have several months or a year or more left to accomplish the goal. It’s hard to maintain motivation for a single goal for such a long time. Solution: have smaller goals along the way.

#11: Reward yourself. Often. And not just for longer-term goals, either. In Hack #12, I talked about breaking larger goals into smaller, mini goals. Well, each of those mini goals should have a reward attached to it. Make a list of your goals, with mini goals, and next to each, write down an appropriate reward. By appropriate, I mean 1) it’s proportionate to the size of the goal (don’t reward going on a 1-mile run with a luxury cruise in the Bahamas); and 2) it doesn’t ruin your goal — if you are trying to lose weight, don’t reward a day of healthy eating with a dessert binge. It’s self-defeating.

#10: Find inspiration, on a daily basis. Inspiration is one of the best motivators, and it can be found everywhere. Every day, seek inspiration, and it will help sustain motivation over the long term. Sources of inspiration can include: blogs, online success stories, forums, friends and family, magazines, books, quotes, music, photos, people you meet.

#9: Get a coach or take a class. These will motivate you to at least show up, and to take action. It can be applied to any goal. This might be one of the more expensive ways of motivating yourself, but it works. And if you do some research, you might find some cheap classes in your area, or you might know a friend who will provide coaching or counseling for free.

#8: Have powerful reasons. Write them down. Know your reasons. Give them some thought … and write them down. If you have loved ones, and you are doing it for them, that is more powerful than just doing it for self-interest. Doing it for yourself is good too, but you should do it for something that you REALLY REALLY want to happen, for really good reasons.

#7: Become aware of your urges to quit, and be prepared for them. We all have urges to stop, but they are mostly unconscious. One of the most powerful things you can do is to start being more conscious of those urges. A good exercise is to go through the day with a little piece of paper and put a tally mark for each time you get an urge. It simply makes you aware of the urges. Then have a plan for when those urges hit, and plan for it beforehand, and write down your plan, because once those urges hit, you will not feel like coming up with a plan.

#6: Make it a rule never to skip two days in a row.This rule takes into account our natural tendency to miss days now and then. We are not perfect. So, you missed one day … now the second day is upon you and you are feeling lazy … tell yourself NO! You will not miss two days in a row! Zen Habits says so! And just get started. You’ll thank yourself later.

#5: Visualize your goal clearly, on a daily basis, for at least 5-10 minutes. Visualize your successful outcome in great detail. Close your eyes, and think about exactly how your successful outcome will look, will feel, will smell and taste and sound like. Where are you when you become successful? How do you look? What are you wearing? Form as clear a mental picture as possible. Now here’s the next key: do it every day. For at least a few minutes each day. This is the only way to keep that motivation going over a long period of time.

#4: Keep a daily journal of your goal. If you are consistent about keeping a journal, it can be a great motivator. A journal should have not only what you did for the day, but your thoughts about how it went, how you felt, what mistakes you made, what you could do to improve. To be consistent about keeping a journal, do it right after you do your goal task each day. Make keeping a journal a sensory pleasure.

#3: Create a friendly, mutually-supportive competition.We are all competitive in nature, at least a little. Some more than others. Take advantage of this part of our human nature by using it to fuel your goals. If you have a workout partner or goal buddy, you’ve got all you need for a friendly competition. See who can log more miles, or save more dollars, each week or month. See who can do more pushups or pullups. See who can lose the most weight or have the best abs or lose the most inches on their waist. Make sure the goals are weighted so that the competition is fairly equal. And mutually support each other in your goals.

#2: Make a big public commitment. Be fully committed. This will do the trick every time. Create a blog and announce to the world that you are going to achieve a certain goal by a certain date. Commit yourself to the hilt.

#1: Always think positive. Squash all negative thoughts. Monitor your thoughts. Be aware of your self-talk. We all talk to ourselves, a lot, but we are not always aware of these thoughts. Start listening. If you hear negative thoughts, stop them, push them out, and replace them with positive thoughts. Positive thinking can be amazingly powerful.

See also:

• Jumpstart your day the night before
• Best 8 Way to Deal With Detractors
• Fav Procrastination Hack: 30-10
• Reward Yourself Without Spending a Lot
• Purpose Your Day: Most Important Task (MIT)
• My Morning Routine
• How I Became an Early Riser
• Feeling Down? 7 Ways to Pick Yourself Up!
• Tracking My Goals (Ben Franklin hacked)
• How NOT to Multi-task – Work Simpler and Saner
• Weekly review: Key to GTD and Achieving Goals
• 5 Ways GTD Helps You Achieve Your Goals
• Why is GTD so popular?
• My GTD Implementation
• A Beginner’s Guide to GTD
• Email Zen: Clear Out Your Inbox
• Mind Like Water

Source: Zen Habits

Ever since I got out of debt, I haven’t written much about personal finances, simply because it’s not one of the main focuses in my life. Still, I’ve written a lot about finances in the past — frugality, debt reduction, budgeting, and more — and I think there are a lot of useful articles that newer readers might have missed.

I’ve learned a lot about personal finances in recent years, and I hope my lessons will prove valuable to you, or at least stir up some thoughts that help you in your journey.

I’m not a financial expert, of course, and all of this is simply from my personal experience, with my odd personal take on finances — don’t get into debt, be frugal, eschew credit cards. Please, please don’t start the old credit card arguments again — we’ve gone over them many times on this blog.

So here it is — a list of the best money articles on Zen Habits, as a resource for anyone trying to live more frugally, get out of debt, save money, or simply create a better financial system in their lives. Bookmark it for future reference if you like. Enjoy!

My Favorites

• 20 Money Hacks: Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Finances
• Financial Zen: How to Get Financial Peace of Mind
• How to Make Your Finances Automagical
• 10 Habits to Develop for Financial Stability and Success

Frugality

• The Cheapskate Guide: 50 Tips for Frugal Living
• 50 Tips for Grocery Shopping
• Top 25 Life-Improving Christmas Gifts for Under $10
• 30 Frugal Gift Ideas to Show You Appreciate Someone
• The Cheapskate’s Bible: The Complete Tightwad Gazette
• Monitor Your Impulse Spending Urges
• Cheap but great dates
• Simple Way to Save $3,000 a Year: Brown Bag It
• 50 Ways to Be Romantic on the Cheap
• Enjoy Life Now, AND Save for Later; or, Why Delayed Gratification is a False Dichotomy
• 106 Money-Saving Tips for a Frugal Lifestyle

Debt Reduction

• The 10 Key Actions That Finally Got Me Out of Debt; or, Why Living Frugally is Only Part of the Solution
• 73 Great Debt Elimination Tips
• The 12-Step Get-Out-of-Debt Program
• Fiscal Fitness: Eliminate Debt with 10 Successful Diet Principles
• 10 Ideas for Living a Life Without Credit or Debt
• How I Ended My Love Affair With the Credit Card (and Why I Use Cash)
• Eliminate Debt with the Snowball
• How to get your credit score up, and how not to care

Budgets and Such

• Simple Finances: How and Why to Build Up a Cushion in the Bank
• How to Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck
• 10 Ways to Simplify Your Budget
• 21 Strategies for Creating an Emergency Fund, and Why It’s Critical

And More

• The Six Key Steps to Healthy Finances in Your Relationship
• 10 Ways To Improve Your Financial Situation In Just 15 Minutes
• 10 Lessons to Teach Your Kids About Money
• 7 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for Retirement
• 6 Great Free Alternatives to Quicken & MS Money
• Automate Your Income to Simplify Your Life

Source: Zen Habits

Thousands of students from 10 Ottawa high schools think they may have squeezed into the Guinness Book of World Records with the world’s biggest bear hug.

Organizer Peter Lamothe, who works at St. Matthew Catholic High School, estimated that 12,000 students, teachers and parent volunteers took part in a gargantuan group embrace Friday as part of an effort to raise more than $150,000 for the Ottawa Hospital Foundation, the CHEO Foundation and the Ottawa Senators Foundation.

Byron Shaw, a student at St. Matthew who raised $1,500 said students won’t know until later whether they actually broke the record, but are hoping they succeeded and had fun in the meantime.

“We felt like connected with everyone else and I was in between two Canadian Mounties — it was pretty cool,” said Shaw, who joined thousands of others to encircle the Rideau Canal from the Pretoria Bridge to the Laurier Bridge.

Shaw’s own fundraising was inspired by his family’s experience. His mother was diagnosed with cancer when he was in Grade 6 and died when he was in Grade 8.

“I hope that no one else has to go through what our family went through. We had a lot of bumps and bruises in the road, but we’re working it out.”

Lamothe said the school came up with the idea of combining the record-breaking and fundraising in 2004, inspired by a couple of kids at the school who died of cancer.

“We just thought, ‘Let’s tie the two in,’” he said. “The kids like to have a little goal.”

After their 2004 record of 5,100 group hug participants was shattered by a group of Americans, they brought nine other schools from the Ottawa Catholic School Board for their attempt to crush the new record.

Tiny grins light up reward centers that lead to quality care, study says. Any mother who’s ever felt a jolt of joy at her baby’s first grin knows how intoxicating that can be.

Now, scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine say there’s more to the baby buzz than just a rush of happy feelings. Turns out that seeing your own child smile actually activates the pleasure receptors in the brain typically associated with food, sex — and drug addiction.

“It may be that seeing your own baby’s face is like a ‘natural high,’ said Lane Strathearn, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor and and Texas Children’s Hospital who studied the brain reactions of 28 first-time moms.

“We know similar brain circuits are activated,” he added. “Whether that feels the same as a shot of cocaine, I’m not sure.”

Strathearn and his team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the mothers’ brain reactions to photographs of their own 5-month to 10-month-old babies and those of others in three emotional states: happy, neutral and sad.

As expected, the sight of their own happy babies sent blood rushing to the moms’ brain regions associated with dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in addiction. The spike rewarded the mothers with a neural kick that prompted them to want to take action to care for their babies, Strathearn said.

“It makes sense biologically,” said Strathearn, whose work is published in the latest issue of the journal Pediatrics. “It establishes that bond between parent and child.”

The work is important, Strathearn said, not only because it documents the brain activity of healthy moms, but also because it could provide a baseline for studying the brains of abusive or addicted mothers and lead to possible interventions.

“We want to understand what happens in this relationship with mothers and babies,” added Strathearn, who is a research associate in Baylor’s Human Neuroimaging Laboratory.

No spike for crying babies
Surprisingly, however, the moms in the study didn’t respond as strongly to their own infants when their expressions were neutral — or when they were in distress. The neural scans showed the mothers responded to all crying infants about the same, by activating areas of the brain involved in conflict.

“We were expecting a different reaction with sad faces,” Strathearn said. Although it’s not exactly clear, that could mean that mothers are wired to react to all crying babies, not just their own.

The new study provides important insights into maternal responses to babies’ emotional cues, said Regina Sullivan, a researcher at Joe LeDoux’s Emotional Brain Institute, which is affiliated with the National S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and New York University.

But it doesn’t clear up one big mystery of brain study: Are the documented brain reactions the result of instinct or socialization?

“We don’t know whether this response is learned or innate,” Sullivan said. “People tend to think that we’re innately good parents, but it so happens that parenting in humans and in non-human primates has to be learned.”

‘It’s got to be like crack’
Whether she responded because of instinct or expectation, the results of the study were no surprise to Katrina Lyons, 39, a Houston high school science teacher who joined the research project three years ago, just before the birth of her first son.

Lyons said it’s hard even to describe the joy she felt at the sight of Aiden’s first smiles or those of his brother, Jack, who is 1.

“Does it feel like a high? Oh, yeah,” said Lyons, who surrounds herself with photos of her boys. “It’s got to be like crack. I just have to see them everywhere.”

The Pediatrics study focused on the brain reactions of well-educated, middle-class mothers, but it could have implications for others. Moms who are depressed, for instance, typically fail to respond to their smiling babies.

And other studies have shown that using cocaine, a drug that activates the dopamine reward systems, might interfere with the brain perks prompted by smiling babies. That could explain high rates of child abuse among cocaine-addicted mothers, Strathearn said.

Other scientists are looking at the effects of infant emotions on fathers, but the current study was limited to biological mothers and babies, Strathern noted.

His work was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Kane Family Foundation, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

If the research can help, Lyons said she was happy to participate.

“I think that’s good for all babies,” she said. “Everybody deserves a mama who loves them.”

By JoNel Aleccia
© 2008 MSNBC Interactive
Source: MSNBC

Seven-Year-Old Alexis Goggins Takes Six Bullets to Protect Her Mother. Seliethia Parker always saw her role as protector for her 7-year-old daughter, Alexis Goggins. But it was Alexis who ended up saving her mother’s life by using her little body to shield her mom from a fusillade of bullets.

Doctors told Parker that her heroic little daughter, who was shot six times, would never walk or talk again.

But Alexis has surprised people with her gritty toughness. She’s not only walking and talking, she’s expected to have a full recovery.

“Everybody’s still kind of shocked. This is progressing a little bit more than everybody expected,” Parker said on “Good Morning America” today. “They said she should fully recover.”

Alexis was shot last December when she and her mother were about to get into a car driven by Parker’s female friend. Parker’s former boyfriend, 29-year-old Calvin Tillie, jumped out of nearby bushes and forced his way into the car.

They drove for several minutes before Parker’s friend was able to pull over to a gas station, under the pretense of needing fuel. There she called Detroit police while Parker and Alexis remained in the car.

Parker pleaded desperately with Tillie not to harm her or her daughter, but to no avail.

“Me and Alexis was left in the car with him at gunpoint and he starting shooting,” Parker told GMA.

Fearing for her mother’s life, Alexis bolted into the car’s front seat, crying out, “Don’t hurt my mother.”

“Alexis jumped over the seat to try and save my life,” Parker said.

Using her tiny body as a shield, Alexis blocked six gunshots from hitting her mother. The bullets pierced her right eye, chin, cheek, chest and jaw. When police arrived to the scene, they found Alexis in a pool of blood, curled beneath the steering wheel.

Parker also had been shot in the side of the head and the arm.

Both Parker and her daughter survived, though Alexis endured two painful months in the hospital and underwent six surgeries. Despite doctors’ prediction that Alexis may never walk or talk again, Alexis is thriving.

Alexis said she doesn’t consider herself a hero and said she wasn’t scared during the event.

“I saved my mom,” she said and added she loved her mother a lot and didn’t want to see her get hurt.

Parker has endless gratitude for her selfless daughter.

“She’s my angel and I love her to death,” she said.

The man who allegedly attacked the pair is charged with two counts of assault with intent to commit murder. Tillie, a former convict on parole, also was charged with other offenses.

By ANNA WILD and IMAEYEN IBANGA
Source: ABC News

HONOLULU, HI – The American Lung Association of Hawaii (ALAH) therefore is resolved to begin 2008 by rallying support in the community to advance the cause of lung health.

The first annual “Breathe Concert—Clean Air for Everyone” featuring a top lineup of Hawaii entertainers will begin at 7 p.m. on January 12th at the Hawaii Theater. Among more than 20 entertainers are numerous Hoku and Po`Okela award winners. ALAH Executive Director Jean Evans said Hawaii’s finest entertainers will lend their support to retaining existing laws that protect the quality of the indoor air in which they perform. The concert will be held four days before the State Legislature convenes.

“Our timing is no coincidence,” Evans said. “Passage of the law that prohibits smoking in bars, restaurants, airports, offices and all other public spaces was a milestone in public health. We must protect this pro-health law and focus attention on the necessity to retain and strengthen it during the 2008 legislative session. In addition, we must continue our funding to support adults and children who suffer from asthma and other chronic pulmonary diseases. This fabulous concert will help us do that.”

Entertainer and ALAH Board member Cathy Foy-Mahi is chairing The Breathe Concert. Foy said she gladly accepted the invitation to lead this major fundraising effort because she knows the importance of clean indoor air. “I sing for a living and can’t tolerate smoking where I earn my livelihood,” Foy said. “The new no-smoking law is a hit among all the entertainers because it will extend our careers, as well as our lives. The evidence continues to support the fact that secondhand smoke kills!”

Loretta Ables is another island entertainer who supports the new law and the concert. “I am asthmatic and suffered for years singing in public while surrounded by smokers,” said Ables, who will play Bloody Mary in Lincoln Center Theater’s forthcoming production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific. “It was especially difficult when cigar smoking was the rage and we would literally have groups of 10-20 people coming in surrounding us and lighting up cigars. The air was so thick you could hardly see through it. I absolutely could not breathe, and my doctors said I was in serious risk of losing my voice altogether because of the secondhand smoke. I totally support the cause, the concert and the fight for clean air!”

The concert’s honorary chair is former Hawaii First Lady Lynne Waihee, who urged Hawaii residents to start the New Year right and join the crusade for clean air. “As an island state, we know all too well the importance of clean air, both indoors and outdoors,” Waihee said. “Please join us as we work to prevent lung disease and promote lung health through research and education, and celebrate with us as many of Hawai`i’s top entertainers come together to support our efforts.”

Song Written and Recorded for Concert

Foy has spearheaded the creation of a signature song titled “Breathe” that was written for the ALAH and its concert by composer Johnson Enos. The song, arranged by Kenneth Makuakane of the multi-award winning group The Pandanus Club, was recorded in Hawaii at the Avex Studios by several noted island entertainers. Local broadcasters have been asked to give the song significant airplay leading up to the January 12th concert.

The ALAH revealed earlier this year that 44 percent of the 1,400 students surveyed about at-home smoking said someone in their home smokes. “These results suggest that far too many family members seem unaware that their smoking habit is harming their children,” Evans said. “We must continue our work to spread the word to smokers that the health of their entire family can be improved now and for decades to come if they accept our help and quit.”

– Hawaii joined 13 others states in prohibiting smoking in public places, including bars and restaurants, when it implemented a new law in November 2006. The law is a health-protection measure that safeguards everyone in those locations from secondhand smoke, a proven health hazard. Evans said the ALAH supports clean air quality — inside and outdoors — and is working to ensure that the dangers of secondhand smoke are well understood by our community.

“The Breathe Concert will be our largest event in years and will help us continue our efforts,” Evans said. “We welcome the support of everyone who enjoys clean air and ask them to join us on January 12th for this important fundraising event.”

Animal Had Wandered Into Fla. Neighborhood; Bolted Into Gulf Of Mexico After Being Hit With Tranquilizer Dart. A Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) biologist pulled off a daring rescue off the Panhandle — that of a bear.

Officials say a 375-pound male black bear was seen roaming a residential neighborhood, evidently in search of food, near Alligator Point, some 40 miles south of Tallahassee.

The bear was hit with a tranquilizer dart, but he managed to bolt into the Gulf of Mexico before the drugs took effect.

At that point, FWC biologist Adam Warwick jumped in to keep the bear, who was some 25 yards offshore, from drowning.

He managed to get the bear to shore, and then a backhoe operator helped load the animal onto a truck. The bear was relocated to Osceola National Forest near Lake City, Fla.

On The Early Show Monday, Warwick told co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez he wasn’t worried about the bear injuring him as much as a sting ray stinging him.

“I just wanted to try to get in front of him and keep him from swimming out there and drowning,” Warwick says.

The bear, he continued, “started to swim, started to make the four-mile swim across the harbor. And so, I looked at (a colleague) and I said, ‘I’ve got to go out there and stop him.’ So, I took off my shirt and shoes, jumped in the water and swam in the direction to head him off and keep him from going into deeper water. Once I did that, I got in front of him, tried to create some splashing and some commotion and tried to get him to go back into shore. But he wasn’t having any of that. The scariest part was probably when he decided — he started looking at me as if he wanted to climb up on me to keep from drowning and, at one point, he reared up on his hind legs, so I’m looking at a six-and-a-half-foot tall bear. Instead of lunging forward, he fell straight back and was submerged for a couple of seconds and, that’s kinda when I moved in.”

According to FWC, “Warwick kept one arm underneath the bear and the other gripping the scruff of its neck to keep the bear’s head above water. Warwick said he walked barefoot over concrete blocks crusted with barnacles in the 4-foot-deep water as he tried to guide and use the water to help float the bear back to shore.

He said he cut his feet on the barnacles and the bear scratched him once on the foot, but he was otherwise uninjured.

Area resident Wendy Chandler said Warwick looked like a lifeguard, pulling a tired swimmer to shore.

Warwick said the bear’s buoyancy made his job less difficult.

“It’s a lot easier to drag a bear in 4-foot water than move him on dry land,” he said.

Source: CBS News

A Filipino teenager who came to New York so doctors could perform surgery to untwist her severely clubbed feet took her first unaided steps Wednesday in pink-and-white sneakers _ the first shoes she’s ever worn.

“I’m very happy,” Jingle Luis said with a smile. “It was exciting.”

The 15-year-old girl arrived at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx in May with her mother for surgery and follow-up treatment.

She had never been able to walk on her own because she was born with feet so clubbed they twisted backward and upside down, forcing her to hobble on the tops of her feet with the help of crutches.

On Wednesday, doctors took off her post-surgical casts and replaced them with special support braces.

Then came the moment she had waited a lifetime for: She slipped her feet into her first pair of shoes and took several long strides.

The surgery, which the hospital performed for free, involved inserting screws into the bones of her feet and turning them bit by bit to straighten them out.

When the pins were taken out, the feet were straight, but casts were put on for several weeks to keep them that way.

Dr. Terry Amaral, her surgeon, expects Jingle to wear the braces for about a year.

“This is a miracle. I am very thankful to God,” said Jingle’s mother, Jasmine Luis, who makes a living selling fish door-to-door. Jingle’s father is a corn farmer.

Jingle’s case came to the attention of Montefiore after a staff physician traveled to the Philippines in 2003 with a Christian relief mission.

While clubfoot is a relatively common deformity, occurring in about one in 1,000 births, children are usually treated in infancy with casts or braces that gradually bring the feet into correct alignment.

Amaral said Jingle’s condition was complicated by spina bifida, a birth defect that involves the incomplete development of the spinal cord or its coverings.

Doctors who saw Jingle as a baby thought her spina bifida would shorten her life span and prevent her from walking, so they did not treat the clubfoot, Amaral said.

But Jingle’s condition turned out to be relatively mild.

“She’s essentially a normal child,” Amaral said.

___

Associated Press reporter Bonny Ghosh contributed to this report.
Source: CBS News

Paris, France - Freed hostage Ingrid Betancourt has been welcomed by French lawmakers with a rousing standing ovation.

With tears in her eyes, Betancourt gently shook her head in disbelief as senators rose to their feet to applaud her on Tuesday. Christian Poncelet, president of the French Senate, encouraged those in the auditorium to stand, crying ”Debout! Debout! (Stand up!)”

Poncelet praised Betancourt’s courage and tenacity, saying she had always been in senators’ thoughts during her more than six years as a hostage of leftist rebels in Colombia.

Betancourt is French-Colombian. Colombia’s army freed her and 14 other hostages from the FARC rebels in a daring rescue last week.

The Associated Press

A year ago, Kyle Taylor approached Ashoka with the idea of travelling the globe to meet up with and document the stories of thousands of youngsters who are creating social change – just like him. “All these young people are having an incredible impact on their communities and it was my hope that by telling their stories I would inspire others to action as well,” Kyle explained.

Working to build a powerful network of young changemakers from around the world, Ashoka’s Youth Venture programme provides coaching, resources and seed funding for young people to launch and run sustainable community-benefitting ventures. “We believe it will catalyse a cultural sea of change, trans-forming a generation of young people into capable leaders,” say Ashoka.

During his ‘Dream it. Do it. World Tour’ Kyle met up with fellow Youth Venturers from eleven countries: Chile, Argentina, Brazil, France, Belgium, Germany, South Africa, India, Mexico Thailand and the US. He also fully documented his journey with videos, pictures and a regularly updated blog on Youth Venture’s global community action website.

“Young people the world over are uniting to battle against systemic social problems in a way no generation has done before,” Kyle says. “We have the education, ability and determination to change our world, community by community. So, if things are going to change, it has to start with us.”

Not only has Kyle introduced the world to the incredible work of these inspiring young changemakers but his journey helped spark the excitement behind the global Youth Venture movement. Here are some of the amazing individuals and young groups that he documented during his world trip.

Standing Tall in South Africa
Ethan’s Teddy Enterprise
Julio Gives Pure Art to Brazil
Bread Winners Unite for Change
Reshaping his Neighbourhood
Paving the Way
Ashita Gives 300 Million a Voice

Contact: www.kyletaylor.com
or www.genv.net
or www.myspace.com/youthventure
or www.ashoka.org

BUTHA-BUTHE, Lesotho – Prince Harry says his mother would be proud of the work he and his regiment are doing to revamp a school for disabled children in the impoverished African kingdom of Lesotho.

Prince Harry was speaking Tuesday at the Thuso Center in a village outside the Lesotho capital, Maseru.

Prince Harry says he pushed wheelbarrows, filled trenches and worked up a sweat, saying: ”It would be wrong for a patron of a charity to not get involved.”

He is in the country with his regiment, the Household Cavalry, assisting with projects run by Sentebale, the charity the prince set up in his mother’s memory with Prince Sessio of Lesotho.

By Associated Press

Brightly-colored beetles or caterpillars feeding on a tropical plant may signal the presence of chemical compounds active against cancer and parasitic diseases, report researchers writing in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. The discovery could help speed drug discovery.

Scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and other organizations collected beetles and caterpillars on plants that produce compounds with and without activity against various cancers and parasites. They found that insects showing warning coloration — bright colors and bold patterns — were significantly more common on plants that contained anti-cancer and anti-parasite compounds. There was no difference in abundance of plain-colored insects between plants with and without bioactivity.

“We just put two and two together,” said Julie Helson, a student at McGill University when she did this work and now pursuing a PhD at the University of Toronto, “We knew that brightly colored insects advertise to their predators that they taste bad and that some of them get their toxins from their host plants, but because other insects cheat by mimicking the toxic ones, we weren’t sure if insect color was really going to work to identify plants containing toxins. It did!”

STRI says that the work supports the idea that “ecological and evolutionary theories about chemical defense in rainforest plants… can significantly improve the efficiency and lower the cost of drug discovery, when compared to a random screening approach.”

“Although the idea that brightly colored insects could facilitate the search for medicinally active plants has been discussed for decades, the concept had never been rigorously tested. Our new work suggests that a quick screen for insects with warning coloration on tropical plants may increase the efficiency of the search for compounds active against cancer and tropical parasitic disease by four-fold, another example of how ecology can contribute to the discovery of novel medicines. It’s very gratifying to see that it works in the field.” said Todd Capson, an Associate Scientist with STRI and a professor at McGill University who directed the project. “I am hopeful that other investigators will follow our lead and test our theory that insects can lead us to plants with disease fighting properties. Our work also demonstrates that the protection of tropical forests, not just the insects and plants, but at every level, has the potential to provide immeasurable benefits to human health.”

Funding for the study was provided by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and a Levinson Fellowship from the STRI-McGill NEO program.

Julie E. Helson, Todd L. Capson, Timothy Johns, Annette Aiello and Donald M.Windsor. 2009. Ecologically and evolutionarily guided bioprospecting: the use of aposematic insects as potential guides to tropical rain forest plants with activity against disease. Front. Ecol. Environ. 7, doi:10.1890/070189.

Source: Mongabay.com

A look at a few of the major accomplishments over the past quarter-century by athletes who were past the age of 40:

Dara Torres: At age 41, the swimmer wins two events at the 2008 U.S. Olympic Trials, the 50- and 100-meter freestyles, setting an American record in the 50 free. She has opted not to compete in the 100 free at the Beijing Games.

Eamonn Coghlan: In 1994, the 41-year-old Irish miler and former world champion at 5,000 meters becomes the first person over 40 to run a sub-4 minute mile. Coghlan clocks a 3:58.15 at a race in Cambridge, Mass.

George Foreman: In 1994, at age 45, the boxer regains part of the heavyweight title he lost to Muhammad Ali 20 years earlier, stopping Michael Moorer with a two-punch combination in the 10th round. Foreman captures the IBF and WBA championships to become the oldest champion in any weight class.

Jack Nicklaus: In 1986, the golfing great wins his last major championship, the Masters, at age 46.

Nolan Ryan: In 1990, at age 43, threw the sixth no-hitter of his career, blanking Oakland 5-0 while pitching for the Texas Rangers. The next season, at age 44, Ryan tossed his seventh no-hitter against the Toronto Blue Jays.

Darrell Green: Elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in February in his first year of eligibility, the Washington Redskins cornerback was 42 when he retired after the 2002 season. He had at least one interception in 19 consecutive seasons.

Martina Navratilova: A month before her 50th birthday, in 2006, the tennis champion finished her career by winning her 59th Grand Slam title, teaming with Bob Bryan to take the mixed doubles championship at the U.S. Open.

The Associated Press

Aliette Jamart’s untiring commitment to return orphaned chimpanzees back to the wild in Africa, has led to one of the most successful reintroduction programs in conservation history. As a result, she has been awarded the Legion of Honour and ranked as a Chevalier – or Knight – by the Government of France.

Aliette is the founder of HELP-Congo, the Habitat Ecologique et Liberte des Primates sanctuary in the Republic of Congo, which began rescuing orphaned chimpanzees in 1989.

“We are extremely proud of Madame Jamart,” said Doug Cress of PASA, the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance. “Not only did she create a sanctuary in Congo at a time when few existed, she also took the work one step further and proved that chimpanzee reintroductions could work. Today, more than half of our sanctuaries are committed to these programmes and HELP-Congo is still the model we use.”

The Legion of Honour was created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 and it is the highest decoration awarded in France. Aliette Jamart receives it for more than four decades of conservation work.

www.pasaprimates.org
President HELP-Congo, Aliette Jamart
www.help-primates.org

Through his foundation, Microsoft founder is aiming to change charity – There’s a story about Bill Gates that his wife, Melinda, likes to tell. Shortly before the couple established their philanthropic foundation in 1997, Bill carried around in his briefcase for a month an emotional letter from an American family asking him to help a sick child who needed a kidney. “Bill agonized over it,” Melinda recalled at a digital industry conference last month in California. “Do you spend $20,000 on a single transplant or buy vaccines for many children in Africa?”

For the past 10 years, the Gateses have opted for the latter: “How can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have?” Bill asked a sea of Harvard University graduates at their commencement ceremony last year.

The answer? If you’re Bill Gates — with $37.5 billion in your foundation’s coffers and as much as $100 billion to contribute over the course of your lifetime — you do it very, very carefully, say philanthropy leaders. With that kind of wealth comes unprecedented giving power: you have the world’s biggest foundation — the Wal-Mart of the global charity sector — and you’ve got the single most powerful leadership platform in philanthropy today. “One out of every 10 foundation dollars spent is going to have the Gates name on it, and that gives (Gates and his foundation) an influence that is impossible to calculate,” says Rick Cohen, the former executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. Adds Steve Gunderson, president of the 2,000-member Council on Foundations: “Bill Gates is now the face of philanthropy for the country, if not the world” — and like it or not, Gunderson told Contribute Media, “the Gateses will have an obligation to lead and deliver for decades to come.”

Indeed, as Gates formally leaves his day job at Microsoft next week to start work full-time at his family foundation (“not to retire,” Gates says, but to “reorder my priorities”), all eyes in the nation’s $300 billion philanthropy sector are focused on the man that many in the field now call “the Rockefeller of our time,” the 52-year-old ex-computer nerd-turned-richest man in America (after Warren Buffett) — the guy who helped spawn the last century’s personal computer revolution and who now, with the same brainiac zeal, wants to make social problem-solving profitable, too.

The Rockefeller of his age
He’s definitely got the cash. Like Rockefeller, Gates is his generation’s richest; his personal assets are valued at an estimated $50 billion, and he remains the largest single shareholder in Microsoft, with 9.6 percent of the stock, a stake currently worth $21.6 billion. That makes for a total fortune greater, in inflation-adjusted currency, than his famous Gilded Age predecessor. Also like Rockefeller, Gates’ journey from tech-industry bad boy and cut-throat business strategist to philanthropist has been a slow and not-always-comfortable transition: Gates, early on, refused to give money away, afraid it would diminish his ability and focus on making money, he told Bill Moyers in a 2003 interview. (“I mean, is it going to erode your ability, you know, to make money? Are you going to somehow get confused about what you’re trying to do?”)

Years later, Gates still is making adjustments. During a recent trip to Africa to visit AIDS patients with Melinda, journalists wisecracked privately about Gates’ decidedly awkward “bedside manner” with patients compared to that of his wife’s during visits to the health clinics that the couple’s philanthropy is supporting. (“It’s awkward for me to be out in the field,” Gates told Moyers. “I’m not, you know, particularly good at it. Maybe I’ll never be good at it … but I know it’s important. If [more] people got out like that, you know, these problems would get addressed.”)

Yet also like Rockefeller, Gates believes in his own hyper-logical way that charity can and should have its biggest impact in the areas of health and education, since this can give people everywhere a better shot at overcoming their disadvantages. A Rockefeller gift led to the first successful vaccine for yellow fever: a Gates donation is supporting the quest for a vaccine against malaria, and the couple has joined fellow American philanthropist Eli Broad in his multibillion-dollar mission to reform the nation’s public school system over the next decade. Besides global health and U.S. education, the Gateses have made global development — anti-poverty work — a third key category for their giving.

Shield-bearer for new entrepreneurial class
But unlike Rockefeller, Gates epitomizes a new and expanding global class of people that didn’t exist at the turn of the last century — a young, impatient new group of entrepreneurial, first-generation millionaires and billionaires in established and emerging economies around the globe who see as their personal mission the goal of changing the world in large and measurable ways during their lifetimes. Gates “is on track to becoming their poster child,” says Harvard philanthropy historian Peter Dobkin Hall.

To be sure, Gates — though getting better at addressing a non-tech crowd — will probably never acquire the rock-star appeal of, say, a Bono or the easy eloquence of a Bill Clinton or the creative vision of ex-eBay President Jeff Skoll, whose philanthropic leadership of the social enterprise movement and support for today’s documentary film craze is seeding a hip new social consciousness among today’s cause-wired youth. But the sheer size of the Gateses’ charity enterprise — along with the couple’s willingness to take risks with its dollars and share what works and what doesn’t in their quest for systemic change — will only become more meaningful to fellow philanthropists over time, sector leaders say.

“I meet many high net-worth individuals that are watching Gates and what he does and how he does it, and that’s really exciting in a behavioral way,” says Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. “It opens up people’s minds to what’s possible with philanthropy today.” Jeff Raikes, the Microsoft executive who was recently named as the foundation’s new CEO, told Fortune magazine in June: “Bill has an incredible opportunity to help shape the thinking of other multibillionaires by getting them to think about the process, the structure, the best practices” of giving money away.

Will he deliver? There’s no question that Gate’s move to focus on his foundation comes at a critical time. Buffett’s decision to give the foundation most of his $45 billion fortune over the next decade is, at least for now, proving to be both a blessing and a curse: already some $3.4 billion of Buffett’s money has been funneled into foundation coffers since 2006, with more coming soon — a rapid capital jolt that has turned the Gates foundation, practically overnight, into the largest private philanthropic foundation of all time. The Buffett mother lode is triggering enormous, startup-style tumult at the foundation and is exacerbating some existing uneasiness in the philanthropy sector over the sheer enormity of what the Gateses are building. Bill himself acknowledged the size challenge — “scale is a challenge” — when he announced he was leaving Microsoft on the heels of the Buffett gift to devote more time to the foundation.

Is giving scalable?
Can it scale well? It’s a fair question. The foundation, which began in 1997 in a small office above a pizza parlor near Microsoft, now has some $37 billion in assets and is nearly four times the size of the next largest foundation. Buffett’s pledge also effectively doubles the Gates foundation’s annual spending requirement — the government requires all private foundations to spend at least 5 percent of their endowments annually — and this, for Gates foundation employees, has unleashed a mad scramble to spend more, faster, and all while retaining effectiveness standards amid a staff expansion that will take the foundation from 543 current employees to more than 800 by year’s end. According to Gates Foundation spokeswoman Heidi Sinclair, the foundation distributed some $2.007 billion last year, roughly 5.4 percent of its endowment, and, to keep pace with its growth from the Buffett gift, will be required to give some $3.5 billion away next year, almost twice the 2007 amount. “One of our greatest challenges is making effective grants,” Sinclair says.

“One of the key questions now becomes, do they decentralize?” says Glen Macdonald, director of the Wealth and Giving Forum, an organization of wealthy philanthropists who run their own foundations and regularly give more than $15 million per year to their causes of choice. “Gates as an entrepreneur and innovator has dealt with scale before. The thing to watch now is how he manages that rapid growth and tension that comes with it. One option is to focus on many areas (of giving versus the three existing ones); another is to build collaboration ties with established public and private foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, and corporations.” Macdonald may as well be speaking for many in the sector, as well as Gates, when he says, “What matters most at the end of the day is outcome.”

Three offices
For months now, Gates has been setting up his three new offices from which to tackle his new job: one will be located at Microsoft in Redmond; a second one, about 15 miles away, will be at the Gates Foundation in downtown Seattle, and a third will be sandwiched between the other two, and located much closer to home. Gates spokeswoman Sinclair says Gates has carved out precise blocks of time in each location: a day in Redmond, two at the foundation and two at his personal office, which Gates told Fortune will probably be his “real center of gravity.”

While he’ll remain chairman of Microsoft, his workload at Microsoft will plummet while at the same time, his work at the foundation will increase sharply. Gates’ official title, which he shares with his wife and father, is co-chair, but his day-to-day role will be as the foundation’s chief strategist.

Foundation insiders expect that Bill and Raikes — the Microsoft business software systems division whiz who will take over as CEO of the foundation in September — will join forces to ease the size challenge. Both Gates and Raikes declined to be interviewed by Contribute for this story, but philanthropy and business leaders expect the two to strategize over new ways to use software and leading-edge applications of information technology to both manage the Gates foundation’s growing complexity, if not the rapid growth of the sector itself, as philanthropy enters a new era of globalization.

“For those who have been criticizing the Gates Foundation on its need to grow faster and operate more effectively, one could say they made the best possible choice” when they chose Raikes to replace Patty Stonesifer as CEO, says Diana Aviv of the Independent Sector, a Washington, D.C. coalition of some 600 charities, foundations and corporate giving initiatives. “Raikes is someone who isn’t intimidated by Gates’ immense wealth and who has, in his own right, been extremely successful” in amassing his own fortune — as well as working with Bill at Microsoft on key strategy, marketing and systems engineering initiatives. Indeed, Raikes is widely credited for racking up much of Microsoft’s profits in recent years as head of its business software division, the company’s cash cow.

“One thing to understand about the foundation,” Melinda Gates told BusinessWeek in 2006, “is that it’s a lot like Microsoft in the sense that we do expect results. We are going to measure things as we go along. We are going to make changes. Sometimes you get other people who come in and do small pieces of this and then their money’s spent and they go away. They don’t stop to say: What did we learn here and how do we change or how do we replicate that in a new way somewhere else?’” Foundation insiders and philanthropy sector leaders say they expect this kind of performance measurement standard to include how well the foundation itself tackles its own internal challenges.

Laudable? No question. But critics say it’s not enough.

They say that in order for the Gates Foundation to earn its mantle of global leadership and contribute real value to the sector, it will need to make some critical leadership and governance reforms — and just as rapidly as it’s giving money away and expanding its ability to do so.

Size matters
The loudest voices pushing change as Gates steps into his new job are those of sector leaders who complain that the Gates Foundation, despite is enormity, has only three trustees — Bill, Melinda and Warren Buffett — and that those three alone should not be charged with deciding how all of the billions get spent. “That is much too small and narrow a board to run a foundation whose combined assets will one day exceed the budgets of all but 30 percent of the countries in the world,” says Pablo Eisenberg, a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute. “This offers little protection to America’s taxpayers or the national interest.”

Last fall, the foundation, responding to the criticisms, announced the creation of three advisory councils, one for each of its three program areas of focus — global health, global poverty and U.S. education. According to Sinclair, the Gates Foundation spokeswoman, the expert panels will help Bill, Melinda, and Warren screen and direct funds for maximum effectiveness. But is it enough? Aviv, the Independent Sector CEO, thinks not. The advisory councils will help, she says, but “boards are wiser when they have a large number of people —because they provide people coming from different backgrounds and experiences” that provide the necessary “checks and balances” required for good decision-making and oversight.

Eisenberg says he doesn’t like the precedent it sets. “There are going to be other billionaires in the future who are going to establish $40 billion, $50 billion, $75 billion foundations,” he says. “The danger to our democracy is that we’re going to have an increasing number of these mega-foundations run by two or three family members who will dictate how these assets are spent. … Their decisions are going to be made without any political process, public discussion, and that is not good for democracy.”

A second size challenge is that the Gates Foundation, by its presence alone, threatens to monopolize activities in the sector and steamroll other players — the so-called Wal-Mart effect applied to the charity sector. In February, for example, The New York Times published excerpts of an internal document from the World Health Organization, a letter from the agency’s chief malaria expert to the agency’s director, Margaret Chan, alleging that the Gates Foundation was having an adverse impact on research into killer diseases. The letter, the Economist magazine reported in an article the following week, said the super-sized clout of the Gates Foundation was “distorting research priorities and quashing independent thinking by sweeping up the best scientists and keeping them ‘locked up in a cartel.’” However unintended, the Gates Foundation’s giant footprint “is squashing the peer-review process because researchers are now bunched into groups competing for Gates funding, and each member of such a group has ‘a vested interest to safeguard the work of the other,’ the magazine reported, quoting from the memo. “Gates can solve problems with money,” the memo said, “but a lot of money leads to a monopoly and discourages smaller rivals and intellectual competition.”

The Gates’ didn’t answer the charges, but foundation spokesmen say they’re mostly off-base. The foundation often collaborates with other charities, including Bono’s group, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The WHO’s criticisms, some say, belie a fear that that the Gates Foundation is setting itself up to topple WHO’s authority in the public health field: the Gates’ recent grant of over $100 million to the University of Washington to evaluate health treatments and monitor national health systems is a job, some at WHO believe, better left to WHO and the United Nations.

Split intentions
But perhaps the most stinging criticism of the Gates Foundation so far is that it (and Buffett) has been investing its considerable charitable assets in corporations that, in many instances, have been contradicting its charitable goals — from companies responsible for heavy air pollution in the Niger Delta to pharmaceutical firms whose pricing policies have tended to keep antiretroviral drugs out of reach for HIV/AIDS patients in developing nations. Some even allege that Gates Foundation investments — as well as Buffett’s — are indirectly supporting the Sudanese oil industry, whose profits, some say, help to support the Sudanese government’s genocide in Darfur.

Though many foundations in America similarly invest their assets in companies that don’t always stand for their own goals as organizations, the Gates Foundation has come under particular criticism for this type of disconnect: the endowment is managed by Bill Gates Investments, which handles Gates’ personal fortune. A January 2007 investigation by The Los Angeles Times found that 41 percent of Gates Foundation’s investments, totaling at least $8.7 billion, have been in companies “that countered the foundation’s charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy.” In addition, much of these investments have been in companies that “have failed tests of social responsibility because of environmental lapses, employment discrimination, disregard for workers’ rights or unethical behavior,” the newspaper said. For example, the foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, the Gates foundation has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France — the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution.

Writing in the May/June 2007 issue of Contribute, a New York-based news magazine and Web site covering the sector, fundraising executive and New York University fundraising lecturer Naomi Levine criticized the foundation for failing to use its considerable financial clout to influence companies to change their policies. “(The Gates Foundation) hasn’t tried to influence other foundations to divest from companies that don’t share their socially responsible ideals,” Levine wrote. “…The foundation’s poor example here should be a siren call for reforms and stepped-up oversight.”

Perhaps most aggravating to Gates Foundation critics is the way it has dealt with their concerns, which some analysts suggest is a carryover from Microsoft’s highly independent and autonomous culture. When the investments story first broke in the Los Angeles Times, for example, the Gates Foundation’s chief operating officer, Cheryl Scott, told a reporter that the foundation would, for the first time, conduct a methodical review of its investments to determine whether it should divest from companies doing harm. She also acknowledged that the way the foundation had been investing its money was not “100 percent effective.” Days later, however, outgoing CEO Stonesifer said any changes in the foundation’s investment policies would probably not occur. Why? Her answer: “Changes in our investment practice would have little or no impact on the suffering identified in The Los Angeles Times article. [We] don’t own big-enough stakes in companies to influence their behavior through shareholder activism.”

To many in the foundation community, the episode represented a time when the Gates Foundation blew an important opportunity to seize global leadership in the philanthropy community worldwide. While the Ford, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, Rockefeller and Charles Stewart Mott foundations all make social justice, corporate governance and environmental stewardship key considerations in their investment strategies, the Gates Foundation has not, and does not — to the frustration of leaders in the field across the board. “With the resources that the Gates foundation has at its command, it could provide an extraordinarily important leadership role for the field if it were willing to shift its investments to more socially responsible companies,” says philanthropy historian Kathleen McCarthy. Adds Doug Bauer, senior vice president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, a nonprofit that counsels foundations: “When the No. 1 foundation is rethinking something, others are going to look at it more carefully.” The Gateses, he added, have the power to “cause a seismic shift in the field.”

An unlikely journey
Nobody, not even Bill himself, expected to find himself such a catalyst outside the technology industry. The socially awkward upstart — who at the age of 12 began effectively debating with his father the logic of doing some household chores — became a billionaire from Microsoft’s 1986 IPO. He had initially resisted the idea of philanthropy: lawyers and accountants advised him to start a foundation “but he refused,” William H. Gates, Sr., told Fortune writer Patricia Sellers in a January 21, 2008 cover story profile of Melinda. “(Bill) said he didn’t need another entity.”

It wasn’t that Gates didn’t know any better: Gates Sr. was head of Planned Parenthood when Bill was growing up; his mother was on the United Way board and continuously urged Bill to form a United Way team at Microsoft, which he eventually did. But the young Gates, for many years, actually feared the dichotomy, seeing the push to make money and the act of giving it away as contradictory, rather than part of the same value system.

According to Gates family lore, it was Bill’s courtship and marriage to Melinda French — a girl from a middle-class family in Dallas who worked her way up to an executive at Microsoft before dating Gates — that turned Gates around. Bill’s mother, Mary Gates, also had a huge influence on Bill’s evolution, urging him, relentlessly, to become more active philanthropically: ironically, it was she who introduced her son to Buffett at a Fourth of July barbecue in 1991 that Bill only attended after Mary begged him to come. Later, at Melinda’s wedding shower in 1993, Mary presented her with a letter that, in so many words, said: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.” Mary Gates passed away the following year; a short time later, the family created the first Gates charity, The William H. Gates Foundation. Bill’s father, with $94 million or so worth of Microsoft stock, ran it out of his basement.

Initially, the Gates’ foray into philanthropy sought to put laptops in classrooms — which some had seen at the time as a self-serving gesture by a software tycoon. But Melinda realized, Fortune’s Sellers wrote, that while volunteering in a couple of schools in Seattle at the time, the technology gap was only part of the problem. She and Bill then decided to take on education reforms more broadly, focusing on secondary schools. “No one was touching high schools,” she told Fortune. “… Bill and I like to work on the problems that nobody else seems to want to face because they’re so hard.”

Next steps
One big part of Bill’s new job will be to make more public appearances and do more schmoozing with governments and corporations as part of the couple’s new advocacy for the world’s poor. “I’m uniquely able to reach out to the big companies, to ask them not just to write checks but to offer more of their innovative power,” Gates told Fortune editor Brent Schlender in a June 20 piece on the transition. “There’s a big category of my time for talking to drug companies, cell phone companies, banks and technology companies as well as talking with other people who are lucky enough to have super-big fortunes about how they want to give those back to society.”

Melinda, meanwhile, will continue to size up ways that technology — and not just software — can be engaged to further the goals of the foundation. At a recent digital tech conference in California in June, Melinda pointed out to conference attendees that of the 6.6 billion people in the world, 3.7 billion have access to a cell phone. “This opens an opportunity to use mobile technology for reworking banking for the poor,” she says. “…Technological revolutions or advances — as the price of (cell phones) really get down — how can we change things for people who live on less than $2 a day?”

Yet along with the passion and curiosity, both Bill and Melinda seem acutely aware of the daunting challenge they’ve created for themselves. “We will make mistakes,” Gates told Moyers in the 2003 interview. “But then again you’ve got to take risks and that’s one of the things a philanthropist can do that governments aren’t as well-suited to do. We in philanthropy should be doing the things that the normal approaches can’t do, whether it’s approaches to the AIDS vaccine or malaria or delivery systems. We’ve got to be out there and accept some kind of failure rate.”

Gates — who dropped out of Harvard to create Microsoft — returned to the university last year to accept an honorary degree and to deliver the 2007 commencement speech to graduates. It was, Gates-watchers agreed, probably one of his finest speeches ever, an eloquent reminder that success doesn’t always mean following the rules. Among other things, Gates told Harvard students that technological achievement is critical in the years ahead, but that “humanity’s greatest advances are not in is discoveries but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity … reducing human inequity is the highest human achievement.”

No question, Bill Gates — innovator, rule-breaker, geek-turned-philanthropist — is just getting started.

By Marcia Stepanek and Cristina Maldonado
Source: MSNBC

From Zen Habits
I worked in the “Happiness” business. For a long time I worked in the Hospitality industry, restaurants and hotels, where I have been a busboy, host, waiter, bartender and manager. For 12 years I spent most evenings and weekends, and every holiday, taking care of people who were going out to dinner or attending an event like a wedding or prom.

I truly enjoyed this work as it was emotionally fulfilling and financially rewarding, not to mention just plain fun a lot of the time.

There are those who would disparage a career path like this as demeaning and servile, yet the call to serve others is the source of my own greatest happiness.

I remember going home after many 12- to 16-hour days, having served hundreds of people their meals and watched them dance and celebrate a special day with family and friends. At these times I felt tired, of course, but also invigorated and gratified by the display of human connection.

The call to serve
Those of you that are parents of small children know about the effort and sacrifice that is required to raise them happy and healthy. And I would submit that you feel that your children are your greatest source of happiness. This same feeling of pride and love comes to many of those who are called to the ministry, teaching, medicine, or even the hospitality industry. Serving others is sometimes a thankless job, yet it remains a reward in itself. Here are some ideas to consider for increasing your personal level of service, while bringing happiness to yourself and others:

1. Show respect and courtesy. It seems like such a small thing, and in our busy lives we often forget that a kind word, a helping hand, or just a smile and “Thank you” can create a bright spot in another person’s life. And then two people are happy.

2. Listen more than you speak. One of the things that my wife has taught me is that sometimes she just wants to vent about her day. Being a man, I will often have advice on how to handle the situation (and men are seemingly hard-wired for problem solving). One of the things that makes her so special is that she tells me when she wants advice and when she just wants me to listen. My listening makes her happy.

3. Give genuine praise. Recognizing the contributions of others is a mighty act of service. This is an investment in others that doesn’t cost you a thing, and the returns can be amazing. Remember, “Praise in public, punish in private“. Even in a disagreement there is an opportunity for service, and you can restore happiness to the relationship, if you speak the truth in love to help another to learn and grow.

4. Keep your promises. You can create an atmosphere of service simply by doing the things that you say you will do. Dependability and punctuality are the hallmarks of the service-oriented individual. When people can trust you it creates happiness all around.

5. Practice forgiveness. Pointless hard feelings are the source of so much unhappiness in the world. Holding a grudge against another is a blemish on your soul. When you can let go of this, you can begin to heal the pain. Making a point of forgiving someone is a great service, for there are times that the person may not even know that they have hurt you. You can even forgive those who do not want to be forgiven, trust me – it will make you happy.

In the end, only you are responsible for your own happiness. Serve others first, and as it says in the Dhammapada: “With our thoughts we make the world. Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow you as your shadow, unshakable.”

By Bill Fishbein
Just before I went off to college, my dad pulled me aside to give me some words of advice. He told me that he had once read in the Talmud that, “If you change one person, you change the world”. While I knew and appreciated that he was trying to share something of profound value to me, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. There are billions of people in the world. And, changing one of them wasn’t going to make one hill of beans worth of difference. Anyway, I went off to college.

In college, while other kids were drinking beer and falling in love, I was falling in love with coffee. I studied late with friends from Venezuela who brewed the most delicious coffee. I should have been as passionate about my studies as I was about the coffee. But, I graduated just the same.

Shortly after college, I returned to Providence, to help my mom and dad in their restaurant equipment business. It was a small business, but we had big dreams. Still, I envied the coffee supplier. We both entered restaurants from the back door, but he had the life! He sold coffee!

Our family went from restaurant equipment sales to gourmet housewares sales, but coffee was always on my mind so one day I told my dad I wanted to bring in a line of specialty to get customers coming in once a week instead of once in a long while. I lied. I really just wanted to run my fingers through the beans.

The business really took off but we were strapped for cash, so we borrowed a little and expanded to 2 locations. We sweated from week to week and the businesses continued to grow. We borrowed a little more and opened a third location, and then we borrowed even more and opened an upscale Jewish Delicatessen. There were lines out the door: we were officially HOT. But, we had borrowed to the hilt. We worked weekends, nights and fended off the creditors as best we could, but the struggle consumed us each day.

My dad had struggled a lot harder than I did. He had pulled himself out of the Depression with the ingenuity and creativity that could only have come from those days. He never realized the fruits of his creativity, as our businesses simply couldn’t keep pace with the debt. Things began to crumble and it was a painful process. We lost everything.

This was a very public loss. Three retail shops and a restaurant, each formerly recognized as vibrant businesses in Providence. It’s not easy to fail in a small town. One day everybody knows your name, the next day nobody will look you in the eye. At least it felt that way at the time.

Enter Coffee

I was 35 years old and I had failed at everything I had had ever tried. But, there was one thing I had never tried, and it was the one thing I really wanted to do: open up my own coffee house. Problem was, I was broke – dead Broke. No credit, not bankable. I did manage to borrow $4000 from a friend and with that money, I started a tiny coffee house. I sold roasted coffee only. I didn’t have anywhere near enough money to build an espresso bar at a time long before the big espresso café boom seen in the US.

Business started slowly… my friends would come into the quiet store, the lack of customers so obvious, and they’d say, “Billy, Get a Job!” Those were the early days, but little by little things got better. With my first meager profits, I built that espresso bar I longed for, and began roasting my own coffee. One day I turned around and there were lines out the door, and a few hundred dollars in my pocket to boot. Not much, but there was no debt against it. I had never been there in my life.

You would think I’d be elated at that point, but I wasn’t. In fact, I found myself in an emotional turmoil. I felt I was leaving a struggle, a struggle that had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember. And, despite the difficulties, despite the failures, I felt that there was honor in that struggle.

Somehow, I was able to realize and confront the reality that coffee, the same coffee that I had fallen in love with so many years ago, the same coffee that gave me opportunity when it seemed the whole world had turned its back, the same coffee that was pulling me out of a financial abyss to a reasonable level of financial security… this same coffee was hardly as generous to the people who grew cared for and harvested it.

I was compelled to go to Guatemala where I met coffee-farming families for the first time in my life. I was shocked at the poverty I saw. On some of the richest lands in the world, children didn’t have enough food to eat. Water born diseases were rampant and medical care was non-existent. Children suffered from easily preventable diseases. Those children who managed to survive ended up working long hours in the coffee fields instead of going to school.

All of this, from coffee. The same coffee that provided my income.

But, more than anything, I was amazed at the honor, dignity and vitality of the people who lived in such conditions. Despite their never-ending struggle, and maybe because it, they were bound together into cohesive communities, communities filled with love and joy for life, a dynamic spirit about them. Honestly, I wondered who was more impoverished – them or me. I wanted to learn from them. I had no idea at the time how much I actually would.

When I returned home I faced a dilemma. With but a few hundred dollars in my pocket, my head was telling me this was no time to become a philanthropist. At the same time, though, my heart was telling me that you can’t make a profit at someone else’s expense.

Enter Coffee Kids

I can honestly say that at this point, and for the first time in my life, I decided without any hesitation whatsoever to follow my heart. I started an organization called Coffee Kids in order to help coffee-farming families improve the quality of their lives. I raised money from my own business and from coffee businesses like my own, and from my own customers and from other consumers as well. I did it for personal reasons. I had to do something for the people upon whose shoulders I stood to earn a living. And, I couldn’t sell one more pound of coffee without doing so.

I was fired up like never before, and money was beginning to come in. It was time to organize and start some specific projects. One project in particular stands out in my mind was the plan to help small-scale coffee-farmers in a remote region of Guatemala improve the quality and yield of their coffee crop. This made a lot of sense to me: after all, I was in the coffee business. But the following year world coffee prices plummeted and the project failed. Failed so bad that some farmers lost their farms. I felt terrible – what had I done? Who did I think I was? In my effort to help, I had tinkered with people’s lives. At that point, I decided that it was time for me to shut up and start listening.

When I started listening, I began to hear things I never heard before like, “All we have is coffee. And, coffee isn’t enough. The harvest only last a few months anyway so, even at the best of prices we have 7 or 8 months without income anyway. We need alternatives!”

The truth is, most of the world’s coffee is grown by small-scale farmers who are totally reliant on coffee as their only source of income. Coffee is all they have In producing countries, the coffee trade is riddled with coyote-like middlemen who take advantage of impoverished coffee farmers. Add to this the fact that coffee is a volatile commodity, its daily price in the most remote regions of the world is determined by speculators in NY and London, buying and selling coffee futures, along with the futures of millions of coffee-farming families every day. Coffee is all they have, and coffee isn’t enough.

I began to listen to coffee-farming families and I learned that no one knows their plight better than they do. No one knows how to deal with it better than they do. Coffee farming families have survived for generations against adversity beyond belief, families who, despite their struggle, have maintained their values, their communities and their culture. They had done all that without me.

In listening, I learned to appreciate coffee-farming families for their strengths, not their weaknesses. So, I began to build relationships with coffee-farming families and local non-government organizations to assist them. I’m talking about long-term relationships, relationships built on trust and openness.

Coffee Kids began to support projects that coffee-farmers created themselves. Projects based upon their priorities – the things important to them, not something important to me. Coffee-farming families create their own strategies to solve those problems, strategies based on their own values, their own culture. In the end, they manage and evaluate their progress based upon their own standards, not mine.

The focus of Coffee Kids’ work is to help coffee farming families create alternatives for themselves so they are no longer totally reliant on coffee as a sole source of income. With coffee-farming families as the guides, Coffee Kids has supported women’s savings and lending groups that help women start small cottage-type businesses, businesses related to their local economies, not the unreliable northern market.

Coffee Kids has supported women’s health collectives affording women the opportunity to take responsibility for their children’s health and nutrition. And, Coffee Kids has supported education programs that provide scholarships for children to attend secondary school and even the university, children who otherwise would not have been able to receive any education at all.

Coffee Kids has helped coffee-farming communities organize themselves and become consultants for other coffee farming communities, communities that are now able to take responsibility for their own development, to carve out their own vision of the future.

Today, there is a glut of coffee on the world market that continuously suppresses world coffee prices. Coffee-farming families throughout the world face their worst crisis in history. In fact, considering inflation, world coffee prices have plummeted to a 100-year low, leaving experienced coffee-dependent farmers with little choice but to leave their homes and their farms for jobs in the cities. Worse still, some risk their lives to cross the border to neighboring countries. Families are breaking up, communities are evaporating, and cultures are being destroyed.

While this is going on, world financial institutions and international agricultural agencies have presided over the largest increase in coffee production in history. In fact, as experienced coffee farmers from one side of the world leave their farms, less experienced farmers from an even poorer part of the world start planting coffee, mostly poor quality coffee.

Vietnam, which had never been a major producer of coffee, has suddenly become the second largest producer in the world, second only to Brazil. Coffee production continues to increase even as prices continue to drop, defying the laws of supply and demand. The overwhelming dependency on coffee has ensured that the only thing sustainable about coffee is the coffee crisis.

And yet, while millions of coffee farming families are becoming refugees, many who work with Coffee Kids have income in addition to coffee and have been able to remain at home with their families and their farms. Cultures thriving, communities in tact, farms functioning and families together.

It hasn’t all been rosy. Every project has had its share of challenges. But, I learned a long time ago, that within each failure lie the seeds for success. So, Coffee Kids stand behind coffee-farming families who are struggling and we support them through their difficulties until they find their way, as they pick themselves up and create their own futures.

Over the past 15 years, there have been many times when I thought about giving up. But, each time I do, I think of the people who can’t give up, people with whom I have had the honor to work, the people who’s struggle I have had the honor to share. And, it is true. There is honor in the struggle.

Fifteen years ago, I made the conscious decision to follow my heart. And, when I did, I discovered a new world. I have discovered a world where people hold the solution to their own problems. I have discovered a world where generosity is abundant in the poorest of the poor.

In a world where I used to see poverty, I now see opportunity. Where I used to see weakness, I now see strength. And, while I still like to hear myself talk every now and then, I have found far more value in listening.

Sometimes I feel as if I were seduced into the exotic world of coffee to join coffee farming families in their struggle to liberate themselves from their dependency upon the same coffee that brought me to them. My life has changed so much over these past 15 years.

In fact, one day I realized that the whole world looked different to me, that for me, the whole world had changed. And, that’s when I realized that my dad was right. If you change one person you do change the world.

He just didn’t tell me who he was talking about.

Source: CoffeeGeek.com
About the Author
Bill Fishbein is the founder, Executive Director, and on the Board of Directors (as Treasurer) of Coffee Kids: Grounds for Hope, an international nonprofit organization. Coffee Kids works with local non-governmental community organizations in Latin America to create education, health-care, training, and microenterprise programs for coffee farmers and their families.

Not too long ago, Josh Hamilton was out of baseball and addicted to drugs. Few wondered whether his baseball career would ever be resurrected, they just wondered if he’d live to see the next day.

Hamilton’s baseball journey started when he was the first overall pick of the 1999 baseball draft by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. In 2001, Hamilton was in a car accident and at that point started experimenting with drugs. He played sparingly in 2001 due to injuries and drug use. Between 2002 and 2006, Hamilton didn’t play baseball at all. He failed numerous drug tests and had many failed stints in rehab.

In 2006, Hamilton started getting his life back in order and started playing baseball again. He finally made it to the big leagues in 2007 as a member of the Cincinnati Reds. However, during the off-season, Hamilton was traded to the Texas Rangers.

In 2008, Hamilton has been tremendous. He’s leading the American League in homers (19) and RBIs (76), while posting a .312 batting average. Hamilton is now clean, sober and playing the best baseball of his life. He’s truly the ultimate feel good story in baseball this season. And if he keeps it up, he could cap off his story with an AL MVP award.

Toyota plans to install solar panels on the roof of the next generation of Prius hybrid cars, according to a report in Monday’s edition of the Nikkei newspaper.

The panels, which are expected to begin appearing on the high-end version of the gasoline-electric hybrid car as early as next spring, will supply part of the 2 to 5 kilowatts needed to power the air conditioning, MarketWatch cited the Japanese business daily as reporting. Kyocera will reportedly supply the panels.

The move would make Toyota the first major automaker to incorporate a solar-power generation system into a mass-produced car.

Prius was introduced in 1997 and has since sold more than 1 million vehicles worldwide. The car was redesigned in 2003, and a third generation has been widely expected to appear soon.

Source: CNET News