In the documentary trailer above, CNN Special Correspondent, Soledad O’Brien sheds light on the lives of Haitian children including one special 6-year old girl who is living in an orphanage called The Lighthouse, run by American missionaries in Port Au Prince. The documentary, called Rescued, airs on CNN on May 8th.

Children are the future of every nation. In Haiti, 38 percent of Haiti’s nine million people are under the age of 15 and about 45 percent are 18 and under, according to population estimates. In the aftermath of the 7.0M earthquake that hit the nation three weeks ago, the need for support and education of these children becomes exponentially more urgent.

A number of trusted organizations are on the ground in Haiti right now, providing food, water, and psychological help to children who have lost one or both parents in the earthquake. Organizations like UNICEF, specifically, are working hard to identify children who have lost one or both parents and reunite them with extended family members.

In addition to identifying children, UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman, reports that the biggest challenge right now is to provide a means to continue to educate the children of Haiti.  Veneman informs us that before the earthquake, “only 50% of Haitian children were going to school.”

We all know that a society’s development and ability to thrive depends on the quality of education it provides its young people. As Lyndon B. Johnson stated long ago, “At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer for all the problems of the world – comes to a single word.  That word is education.”

It’s good to know that organizations like UNICEF are on the ground in Haiti right now working hard to help the country reinstate some semblance of education for Haiti’s young people.

UNICEF reports it immediately sent to Haiti 1,000 of its recently launched Early Childhood Development kits for emergencies. The kits address the holistic needs of young children, providing basic services related to hygiene and sanitation, health and nutrition, and protection and education. They also contain an illustrative activity guide in French so caregivers can immediately establish an interactive and supportive environment for children.

Education is the cornerstone for rebuilding Haiti. To learn more about how to help UNICEF in Haiti, please visit: UNICEF.org.

* Photo thanks to Save The Children Flickr stream

Today marks the beginning of World Orphan Week, a week created by SOS Children’s Villages, the world’s largest orphan charity, to raise awareness of the world’s orphans and raise funds to help give orphaned and abandoned children a family.

At Smitten With Mittens, we are big supporters of SOS Children’s Villages, an organization we have featured in previous posts. SOS demonstrates a keen understanding of the challenges faced by the estimated 133 million children worldwide who have lost one or both parents. For over sixty years, SOS has worked tirelessly to build villages that provide a loving, family style environment.

In support of World Orphan Week, we’ll be featuring ways to help orphans throughout the week, and will be sharing stories of organizations that are doing great work to empower orphans around the globe. Feel free to let us know about trusted organizations you would like us to feature. To support the great work of SOS, you can sponsor a child or a village right away by visiting SOS Children’s Villages.

From time to time we spotlight an organization that we think is doing superlative work on behalf of children in need (see our post on Niños de Guatemala). With more than 2,000 facilities in 132 countries and territories, the Austria-based SOS Children’s Villages has helped about 73,000 children and young people find homes and given more than 1.2 million children and adults access to social services ranging from schools to medical centers.

With a general focus on children’s education, health and rights, SOS Children’s Villages works to form a national association with its own statutes and boards of director in each country where it operates. With membership in the international umbrella association, the smaller groups can apply for funding and request services. The organization embraces the web as a way to spread its message and connect its stories with the public. Check out Mexico’s page for an example.

SOS Children’s Villages was founded in 1949 by Hermann Gmeiner. By the end of the following decade, associations were running in France, Germany and Italy. In the 1960s, work began in Asia (South Korea) and Latin America (Uruguay), and the first African efforts began in the 1970s in Ivory Coast, Ghana, Kenya and Sierra Leone. Last year, as SOS celebrated its 60th anniversary, the 500th Children’s Village opened.

More recently, shortly after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti’s capital, a team from SOS’ Dominican Republic group hired a helicopter to travel to Santo, where SOS Children’s Villages runs one of its facilities. The team didn’t gain permission to land, but members were able to shoot video of the area, about 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, to help show outsiders how severe the destruction was. Check out the video here.

Among the organization’s other recent noteworthy projects was its November effort to provide food and advice on hygiene and sanitation to families in El Salvador affected by the tropical storm that hit the area at the beginning of that month.

Child and village sponsorships are just two of the ways you can support this organization. For other options and additional information about SOS Children’s Villages, visit their website at: http://www.sos-childrensvillages.org

That strikes me as the best word to use to describe how, time after time, people from around the world, with wildly divergent beliefs, will come together to help those in need. The devastating earthquake that shook Haiti’s capital city yesterday and caused yet-unknown deaths and damage is the latest proof. We’ve seen it before, relatively recently with Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 tsunami, among other tragedies, but the interesting thing about this situation is how we’re all able to access information and send out our own calls for help almost immediately via social networking tools. Armed with a computer and/or a cellphone, we all can become powerful advocates.

Just check out Twitter, whose users have made Help Haiti a trending topic for the past 24 hours. Through Twitter, Facebook, blogs and countless other tools each of us can monitor what’s going on and figure out the best and most effective ways to help.

If you’re looking for a good place to start, here are a few suggestions: CARE is a trusted organization to help deliver aid to the quake survivors. And I just donated $10 to the Red Cross by texting HAITI to 90999 (something I learned about not from a news article but from a friend’s Tweet). You can do the same or find another way to help via this blog.

*photo courtesy of Blogs @ BET

It seems that every day there’s another news report about how holiday gift sales are shaping up this year (they’re rebounding! They’re slipping! They’re steady!). Forecasters are still unsure about how the figures will shake out, but one thing is certain: U.S. charities are struggling to attract the same level of giving in 2009 that they received in prior years. And they aren’t counting on a big boost from people giving donations as holiday gifts either, according to a recent report. Thirty-eight percent of Americans said they were going to include charitable gifts among their holiday presents this year; that’s an 11 percent decrease from last year, according to a Harris Interactive survey released last month.

Overall, the same number of Americans are passing along dollars to charities, but they are making smaller donations. That’s bad news for charitable organizations, whose services are becoming more important as the economy continues its rocky ride. Nancy Brown, whose quote begins this entry, said her Dallas-based organization ended its fiscal year on June 30 with an 11.8 percent decrease in donations. That’s a sobering figure, especially for those of us focusing energy on philanthropic efforts.

The news isn’t all bad. Brown did note that the number of volunteers participating in the Association’s efforts actually increased this year. People without the disposable income they enjoyed earlier in the decade are still finding ways to give back. It’s all about doing what you can, giving what you can.

On that note, we’ll be providing more opportunities for people — and corporations — to get involved with our endeavor beyond simply making straight donations. Take a look at our reshaped focus and stay tuned for updates as we continue to work toward bringing some extra warmth to the lives of children in need around the world.

Happy holidays from the SWM team!

Just last week, a retired military officer was convicted for masterminding the “forced disappearance” of civilians during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. In the first conviction against an army officer since the war ended in 1981, Col. Marco Antonio Sanchez was sentenced to 53 years in prison. Witnesses tied Sanchez to the disappearances of eight people. Overall, the war razed hundreds of Mayan villages and caused the deaths of an estimated 200,000 people. The Guatemalan civil war, which saw left-wing insurgents battle U.S-backed military governments, was the longest and, according to many, most brutal in modern Latin American history. (It’s worth noting again that Guatemala’s military governments were, like many other violent Latin American dictatorships, backed by U.S. administrations.)

The war created a generation of orphans — a problem that continues to plague the country. In more recent years, disease and natural disasters have added to the number of children without one or both parents. In 2005, as many Americans struggled to understand how Hurricane Katrina could cause such devastation in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, mudslides triggered by Hurricane Stan created as many as 2,500 orphans in Guatemala, which considered itself a forgotten victim of the season’s many destructive storms. UNICEF estimated the total number of orphans in the country at a staggering 360,000 in 2007.

Antigua has become relatively well-known to Americans in recent years because of its growing tourism industry, which has expanded exponentially since the violence of the last century subsided. Home to about 35,000 people, Antigua (which means “old” in Spanish) formerly was the capital of Guatemala. Its population peaked at about 60,000 way back in the 1770s. These days, besides being known as a great home base for visitors looking to explore the Guatemalan Highlands, Antigua is known for its elaborate religious celebrations during Spring and for its many Spanish language schools. A friend who spent some time in Antigua a couple of years ago was struck by the area’s charm and natural beauty, but also noted the extreme poverty in some pockets.

I’m looking forward to discovering more about this area as the entire SWM team continues its work to bring a bit of extra warmth to children who need it. Stay tuned for more.

*Photo courtesy of Skip Hunt

Formed in 2003, Global Action for Children advocates on behalf of the world’s orphaned and vulnerable children on the following issues:


*Basic education
*Child marriage
*Child sexual abuse
*Child survival & immunizations
*Children in conflict
*Community care
*Foreign aid reform
*HIV/AIDS
*Malaria

GAC is successful because of its independent and bipartisan approach to advocacy. They do not accept government funding. As a result, policy work is in the best interests of children and not in the self-interest of GAC. Moreover, GAC understands that supporting the world’s children is a cause that can unite leaders from all ideologies.

GAC’s growing list of success stories includes:

*Generating the support to pass the Assistance for Orphans and Other Vulnerable Children in Developing Countries Act (P.L. 109-95) in 2005. It was the first comprehensive legislative response to the global crisis surrounding orphans and vulnerable children (OVC).

*Coordinating our partners in the AIDS-Free Generation coalition to boost the UNAIDS resource needs assessment from $1.2 billion to $4.5 million to account for 19 million orphans between 2008-2015.

*Leading efforts to authorize $3 billion (10 percent of PEPFAR funding) for OVC programs from 2009-2013.
Placing op-eds and letters to the editor about orphans and vulnerable children in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vanity Fair.

Investing in orphans and vulnerable children is an investment in our collective future. Smitten With Mittens is thrilled to partner together with Global Action for Children in this important work. We will be launching our Smitten store soon where you can buy colorful mittens to help us in our effort to support children in need worldwide. Stay tuned!

Like most kids, I used to shift uncomfortably and giggle when asked to share what I was thankful for during Thanksgiving dinner. But as I entered my 20s and my perspective widened, I realized how much I had compared to so much of the world’s population. When Adriana first mentioned the idea of distributing mittens to some of the developing world’s orphans, I had one of those realizations. There are countless children in our own country and around the globe who lack the very basic necessities: food, shelter, potable water and, yes, mittens. (And we’re not just talking about physical mittens; it’s about what mittens represent: warmth, love, security. But I’ll dive into that discussion another time.)

So this Thanksgiving I’ll take an extra moment to give thanks for all the luxuries I have, for my loving family, my caring friends and for the opportunity to work with the Smitten WithMittens team as it prepares for its first drop-off, benefiting orphans in Antigua, Guatemala. It’s been a joy for me to see the organization grow from an idea Adriana excitedly mentioned to me way back in 2006 to a team of people sharing some of their time and expertise to provide a little extra warmth to kids who so often are forced to go without.

As we enjoy this upcoming long weekend and Thursday’s typically overwhelming Thanksgiving meal, I encourage readers to think of ways they can give back, starting, of course, with a donation to this growing group. But whether your gift is a financial one that benefits us or just some extra kindness toward someone in your life, consider taking steps toward helping others. After all, as the quote at the beginning of this entry points out, philanthropy is as American as Thanksgiving itself. That’s just one more thing the SWM team and I are thankful for.

After working as a business journalist at a magazine and website focused on diversity issues, T.J. has spent the past several years exploring social media. First as the community advocate and content editor at an online video site and now as an associate community manager at Digg, T.J. is commited to the democratization of media and empowerment of community members as they move from being media consumers to influencers. As a freelance writer, T.J.’s work has been published in Men’s Health, DiversityInc, siliconindia, the Christian Science Monitor and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, among others, and he has blogged professionally and personally since 2000. A graduate of Rutgers University, where he studied journalism and Spanish, T.J. can be found at http://tjdegroat.com/.