Looking for the Very Best Bang for your Philanthropic Buck? Don’t Overlook the Turimiquire Foundation

Like most people, there are a number of things I do with ridiculous consistency throughout the holiday season.  For me, it starts Thanksgiving Day, when I wake up and make a few calls to thank the people who made great personal sacrifices to ensure that I turned out to be a half-decent human being.  And then, in mid-December, I write three checks to causes I believe to be supremely worth-while. 

Two of them are schools I attended, but the biggest amount of this (extremely modest) largess goes to my forever-friends at the Turimiquire Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to improving the quality of life for the poorest of the poor in Northeast Venezuela.  Chief among their arenas of activity are education, sustainable agriculture, and family planning.  And let me say, they’re not just trying; they’re incredibly good at this.  Check out their website, and note the results, in terms of:

• Fewer unplanned children
• Planned children are better spaced
• Young women have fewer children — and later
• Infant and maternal mortality significantly reduced
• Children, especially girls, are graduating from high school for the first time
• Students, especially girls, graduating from high school, are pursuing higher education for the first time
• Computers and Internet available for the first time
• New rural kindergarten, school library, cafeteria, child care center
• Clean gravity-piped water, solar electricity for off-the-grid families
• More sustainable livelihood — the natural environment benefits right along with the human community

I met Willie Bloomstein, who coordinates the organization’s efforts in North America, in the springtime of 1995 when he and I were marketing consultants to Motorola’s Information Systems Group, headquartered in Manchester, Massachusetts, just a few minutes from where the New England Patriots play their home games, about an hour south of Boston.  Within five seconds of the moment he commenced speaking at a meeting, I knew that I had met a man of great intelligence and an amazing level of talent for passionate, to-the-heart communication. After our term at Motorola had passed, I hired Willie in numerous other client accounts, and I never found him any less impressive.

It was during some of these later associations that he told me about his role in, what I believe to be, the very best “bang for the buck” in terms of value for humanitarian donors’ dollars.

Turimiquire (“seat of the gods” in the local language) was founded by Willie’s older brother and the brother’s best friend, both of whom came out of Harvard in late 1960s/early 70s.  They recognized that they were on a course to be senators or captains of industry – not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But one day shortly after graduation, they looked at one another and simply said, “Nope.”  Shortly after that, they were a thousand miles from nowhere, working with some of the most desperate people on the planet.

I hope you’ll check this out.  I know for a fact that I have readers with bankrolls a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than mine.  Now’s the time – and this is the place — to be generous.