poverty :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

In my post yesterday about Blog Action Day, I promised more information about a project we are supporting, with a focus on children.

It’s called simply The Library Project and it is about providing books for children in developing countries. Quite simply, books help their education and education empowers individuals and communities to rise out of poverty. Simplistic? Maybe, but I believe it works.

It’s easy, in developed countries, to take for granted the availability of books for children. By way of illustration, one of the biggest challenges Suzie and I had to deal with on our recent trip to the US for BlogWorld Expo was how to get out of a bookstore in Las Vegas without buying so many childrens’ books that our luggage would be overweight.

It’s not that in Australia we don’t have a range of childrens’ books – just that we don’t seem to have the range they have in the US and like all books they are more expensive here. Also, as in other developed countries, we do have public libraries with childrens’ books in abundance. And then there are school libraries.

In China, Vietnam and in other developing countries there are schools with few books, or no books at all.

The Library Project seeks to play a role in remedying that, book by book, school by school, and generally to support education in Asia, through the generosity of people around the world.

There are three programs:

Elementary School Program in China and Vietnam
Orphanage Program in China and Vietnam
Earthquake Program (Sichuan and Shaanxi Provinces, China)

If you are thinking, as I did at first, “A library? I don’t have the sort of money needed to build or stock a library!”, then I encourage you to check out the options for helping with The Library Project. If you are like me I suspect you’ll be surprised by what can be achieved with amounts of money that for comparable projects in the developed world would be regarded as negligible.

For example:

For $250 – $500 we are able to provide 500 to 3,000 Chinese language children’s books, plus tables, chairs, and books shelves where appropriate.

You can do a group project or contribute individually. To make it really easy, they will take PayPal donations. For US readers “The Library Project is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization, and all donations are tax deductible.”

If you do decide to contribute, or perhaps have a project to get a group of family, friends and colleagues to, say, sponsor a whole library, be sure to blog about it, then let us know in the comments and make sure you include the link back to where you have blogged about your project or your thoughts on Blog Action Day 2008.

As a founding member (and member of the Advisory Board) of the International Blogging and New Media Association (IBNMA), I was very pleased to learn today that the Association is a sponsor of Blog Action Day, October 15.

This is the first “cause” to be backed by IBNMA.

What Blog Action Day is about

Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.

The theme of Blog Action Day this year is Poverty and bloggers worldwide are being encouraged to participate.

There are three basic ways to get involved:

Publish – a blog post, a podcast, an article
Donate – microloan or just make a donation
Promote – spread awareness of Blog Action Day

There are other suggestions for participation on the Blog Action Day site, including:

helping with translations
joining the 12 hour radio talkathon on October 15.

There are also lots of badges and banners to use in blog posts, sidebars, etc.

It’s easy enough to be overwhelmed by just the thought of poverty in the world and its devastation. If you are feeling daunted about what to post, I recommend you check out the abundant resources at the Blog Action Day site – videos, white papers, fact sheets, contact points for various organizations… You should find something there to inspire you.

And make sure you register your blog: you will be given some code to put in your posts on the subject and that will help spread awareness – as well as no doubt providing the organizers with some helpful stats.

Be in it! Tell us what you are doing for the day. Let’s make an impact!

I’ll be sharing here tomorrow what we are doing in the donation department: a neat project for children, which you too may well find worthwhile supporting.