Hope for Afghan Children

Through our stories we have been able to glimpse the great work Americans are doing to help those in need in developing countries. An attempt to sponsor an Afghan child in an orphanage in Pakistan led to an idea and inspiration to connect children in orphanages to their sponsors via internet connection. Paul Stevers is the featured citizen diplomat on today's blog. His work as a citizen diplomat has inspired others to sponsor Afghan children through an online sponsorship.

Read the story below. Leave remarks and comments of your impressions. If you have a story to tell, please let us know!

Citizen Diplomat Paul Stevers
by Jenna Messier

Paul Stevers began his career in philanthropy and citizen diplomacy in 2004 when he attempted to sponsor a child at a small Afghan orphanage in Pakistan. When Paul realized that this orphanage and others like them could benefit if they could use the Internet to receive money from and communicate with sponsors to support children in their care, he decided to create a non-profit organization to help them do so.

CharityHelp International (CHI) (www.charityhelp.org) has blossomed into an organization which not only collects money and efficiently delivers funds to people in need, it also has created an online sponsorship engine for forging lasting, cross-cultural relationships between orphan children in Afghanistan and concerned citizens from the West. Today, over 400 children are financially sponsored by over 200 individuals living in the U.S., Italy, Australia, and Canada. All of these sponsors and children are connected by CHI's Email Forwarding System which allows for frequent communications where strong relationships grow. CHI also supports the work of indigenous organizations in Haiti, Kenya, and Sudan and has the potential of being used by hundreds of other non-profit organizations.

What is fascinating about Paul's story is that he has inspired many others to give so much of themselves to these kids and organizations. The partnership between CHI and the Afghan Child Education and Care Organization (AFCECO) (www.afceco.org) has only been so successful due to the dedication of the individual sponsors, some of whom have given large donations to build new orphanages, libraries and gymnasiums for the children. The sponsors have even formed their own organization called Hope for the Afghan Children (www.hopeforafghanchildren.org) in order to raise more money and to network among each other to promote the cause. Thus Paul's generosity, which has fully funded the development and maintenance of CHI, has caught on like wildfire.

Paul Stevers has not rested since the success of CharityHelp International. For the past three years, he has been developing a project called Peace through Moderation (PtM) (www.peacethroughmoderation.org). PtM has the lofty goal of raising 50 million dollars from the business and investment community in major financial centers to scale-up proven initiatives designed to counter extremism.

Paul has now developed an partnership with The Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP, www.allianceforpeacebuilding.org) and is now sponsoring the development of this project through this alliance. AfP is comprised of over 60 organizations and includes members such as the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and Search for Common Ground.

In summary, Paul Stevers has engineered two successful approaches to solving global problems by reaching out to like-minded individuals and offering the means for those people to become part of the solution. There are hundreds of smiling faces in the AFCECO orphanages in Afghanistan and Pakistan to prove it.

Posted Friday, July 30, 2010