We have had some exciting news this week at Heifer. We’ve announced our commitment at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting to help 20,250 families in Haiti increase their income with livestock and agriculture training. In light of this news, we’ve also been discussing some of our current work in Haiti on our blog.
As we discussed in last week’s U.S. poverty blog, 1 in 6 Americans are living in poverty. This week, the AP released an interactive map that shows how hard the South has been hit by poverty in the past 30 years.
While I was reading about poverty in America, I came across this Living Wage Calculator that shows how much an individual must earn to support his or her family. The official poverty level income last year was $22,314 for a family of four. If you check out the Living Wage Calculator, you’ll see in Little Rock, Arkansas (where Heifer headquarters is located) the annual income is around $55,028 for a family of four.
A couple of interesting reads over your weekend:
- Big into social media? Then you might find this list of twenty Twitter users discussing the debate of global development interesting.
- Between the rise of food prices and impact of climate change, the food shortages have stunted the growth of 178 million children under the age of 5, the World Disaster Report announced.
- Heifer supporter, Nicholas D. Kristof, wrote an article in the New York Times SundayReview about the drought and famine from his recent trip to a refugee camp in Kenya. I don’t want to say too much about his article, but have a tissue ready.
After you take a look at the articles mentioned above let us know your thoughts in the comment section.