yes we can do more ? now obama gives yunus presidential award

[chris macrae]

link at whitehouse.gov President Obama Names Medal of Freedom Recipients 16 Agents of Change to Receive Top Civilian Honor WASHINGTON, 30 Jy 09 – President Obama today named 16 recipients of the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom. America’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom is awarded to individuals who make an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors. This year’s awardees were chosen for their work as agents of change. Among their many accomplishments in fields ranging from sports and art to science and medicine to politics and public policy, these men and women have changed the world for the better. They have blazed trails and broken down barriers. They have discovered new theories, launched new initiatives, and opened minds to new possibilities. President Obama said, "These outstanding men and women represent an incredible diversity of backgrounds. Their tremendous accomplishments span fields from science to sports, from fine arts to foreign affairs. Yet they share one overarching trait: Each has been an agent of change. Each saw an imperfect world and set about improving it, often overcoming great obstacles along the way. "Their relentless devotion to breaking down barriers and lifting up their fellow citizens sets a standard to which we all should strive. It is my great honor to award them the Medal of Freedom." President Obama will present the awards at a ceremony on Wednesday, August 12. 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom Muhammad Yunus Dr. Muhammad Yunus is a global leader in anti-poverty efforts, and has pioneered the use of "micro-loans" to provide credit to poor individuals without collateral. Dr. Yunus, an economist by training, founded the Grameen Bank in 1983 in his native Bangladesh to provide small, low-interest loans to the poor to help better their livelihood and communities. Despite its low interest rates and lending to poor individuals, Grameen Bank is sustainable and 98% percent of its loans are repaid – higher than other banking systems. It has spread its successful model throughout the world. Dr. Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work. chris what more can yes we can networks do now? http://futurecapitalism.ning.com/

News 2 6 Aug 2009 : Sofia & I were in Germany earlier this week talking to Saskia and Hans and heard plans of Dr Yunus global events supporters to renew millennium goals, celebrations and G8 leadership participation starting from Presidential Award day on. More details as soon as I get them . News 1 : Sam Daley-Harris has written an op-ed celebrating presidential medal of Dr Yunus -please read next post and tell me if you may be able to help place it From Facing page 1 of Dr Yunus 69th birthday dialogue report ... 1997, Washington DC- as the speaker of this text finished, he noted to himself and for posterity. I looked at the audience, knew there was applause, but did not hear it. All I heard was millions of determined voices rising from all over the world saying YES WE CAN make this ambitious, mad, crazy, impossible dream a reality We can have a world free of poverty As we assemble here, I ask “what is microcreditsummit about?”. Is it another Washington gala event? Personally to me it is an emotional event. Like me, there are many here today for whom it is a deeply emotional experience. It is emotional because we have been working very hard to make this day happen. Finally it has happened. I wish to take this opportunity to thanks millions of micro-borrowers and thousands of staff who have been working hard to right a wrong which has caused so much avoidable human misery. To me this summit is a grand celebration- we are celebrating the freeing of credit from the bondage of collateral. This summit is to announce goodbye to the era of financial apartheid. This summit declares that credit is more than business. Just like food, credit is a human right. This summit is about setting the stage to unleash the human creativity and endeavours of the poor. This summit is to guarantee every poor person the chance to undertake responsibility to establish his or her own human dignity This summit is to celebrate the success of millions of determined women who transformed their lives from extreme poverty to dignified self-sufficiency through entering into microcredit programs. It is about creating opportunities for 100 million of the poorest families to follow in the footsteps of these successful women.... We believe that poverty does not belong in a civilised human society. It belongs in museums. Thus summit is about creating a process which will send poverty to the museum. We will create a poverty free world. .

please note the attached birthday report given to dr yunus in june 2009 is a living document - we encourage re-editing- many pages involve more questions as input to dilaogue than answers- [e-mail] dc volunteer yunusforum.net: yes we can bureau 301 881 1655

TEN TIMES MORE ECONOMIC SERIES
-notes on youth ambassador5000 report

-in 2008 at Bali Dr Yunus requested feasibility research on how to connect 5000 youth whose lifetimes could inspire the same sorts of pathways as his Bangladeshi co-workers-

in 2009, as part of his 69 th birthday celebrations in June, this first iteration was reported to provide some structure to this idea – please treat as a living document where each page raises questions for dialogue

Body of report was presented mainly as 9 pairs of pages

On a facing page with illustrative content on first 33 years of practice Bangladesh microeconomics
On main page a question

Attached is a sample of the report ( rsvp [e-mail] if you want to be more involved in report and its dialogues)

Issue 1
What sorts of structure would help connect YES WE CAN celebrate 10 times more economic worldwide across the 3 perspectives of journalism, education, and open source replication of sustainable community solutions

Issue 2
What simple communications practices could deal with this hypothesized catch 22: currently less than 1% of young people who could love to know they have the choice of designing and interacting around microeconomic systems are aware of how to do so in a way that convinces them and their friends that 10 times more economics is communally for real, and can be low cost for them to experiment around

Issue 3
With the future capitalism expectation that 2010s will generate thousands of social business solutions available for open source replication, how do we quality control system designs so they are not misapplied the way that microfinance started to be when it started to make it clear that big banking is 10 times less economics than most people need in main street let alone rural villages

Issue 4
Just as microcreditsummit has some extraordinary events planned including Kenya April 2010 and Madrid 2011 both joyously supported by Queen Sofia of Spain, how can social business summits get better and better and connect with microcreditsummits . The European Creative Lab http://grameencl.com model looks like a key connector in this but how can we amplify such good news across youth ambassadors and the cities they are in?

[chris macrae]

News 2 6 Aug 2009 : Sofia & I were in Germany earlier this week and heard plans of Dr Yunus global events supporters to renew millennium goals, celebrations and G8 leadership participation starting from Presidential Award day on. More details as soon as I get them

News 1

Sam Daley Harris has written an op-ed he would love help in placing as described. If you can do something on this and need to get in touch with sam, please tell me at [e-mail] so I can intro you by email

Sam says: I've written an op-ed you can pitch titled A Champion of Yes We Can angled on the Presidential Medal of Freedom that President Obama will give to Muhammad Yunus and 15 others on August 12th. If you read it and love it, please offer it to your op-ed editor so long as your paper wouldn't require a national exclusive (e.g. not the LA Times or NY Times). Please let me know if you'll pitch it. It's fine if you don't.

Thanks so much,
Sam


A Champion of Yes We Can

When President Obama presents the Medal of Freedom to 16 distinguished American and international “agents of change” at a White House ceremony on August 12th one of the honorees will link Mr. Obama to both his past and to the future he is so committed to creating. Among the 16 leaders who will receive America’s highest civilian honor is Professor Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which makes tiny loans for self-employment to some of the poorest people in that country. Prof. Yunus is also one of the world’s most effective champions of the “yes we can” spirit.

Decades ago the economics professor and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate described his search for new bank clients as a process of “looking for the most timid.” He wasn’t looking for the villagers who were the first to step forward to ask for a micro-loan starting at less than $10, he was looking for those who were last to come forward and who trusted their abilities the least. To those villagers he and his staff would say, “Yes you can.”

Thirty-three years later nearly 8 million members of Grameen Bank (a total of 40 million when you count their family members) are saying “yes we can” to the whole world. Since its inception Grameen Bank has lent more than $8 billion to the poor in Bangladesh.

So how does one start an enterprise that reaches nearly 40 million people in one’s own country and touches the lives of tens of millions more in replications around the world? Dr. Yunus had his own “yes we can” moment as a young economics professor who faced an agonizing famine that left him doubting his value as a teacher and as a human being.

He was so shaken by the sight of people dying of starvation that when he set foot into Jobra, the village next to his campus, all he wanted to do was to see if he could be of use to one person for one day—not 40 million—just one. It was in that village that he met a stool maker who horrified him when she explained that she earned only two cents a day for her beautiful craftsmanship. With no money to buy the bamboo she needed, Sufia Khatun was forced to borrow from a money-lender who demanded that she sell her finished stools back to him at a price he set—a price so low that she made only two cents a day profit.

When he asked whether she could earn more if she was freed from the moneylender, she told him, “Yes I can.” Professor Yunus had a student to look for other villagers who were in the same dilemma. The student found 42 people who needed a grand total of $27 to pay-off the moneylender, buy their raw materials, and sell their wares to the highest bidder. That’s right; all they needed was an average of 68 cents each. With her loan of less than $1 the stool-maker’s profits soared from two cents a day to $1.25 a day.

Now Prof. Yunus has set his sights on titans of business and industry with his social business concept and the chairmen of Dannone, Intel, and BASF are beating a “yes we can” path to his door to create new non-profit/non-loss businesses that have as their sole goal improving people’s lives. The corporations can recover their initial investments in the social businesses, but after that, all profits are plowed back into these new companies. They include a joint venture with Dannone producing nutritionally fortified yogurt for malnourished villagers, another with BASF producing chemically treated bed-nets to protect people from mosquitos carrying malaria, and still another with Intel bringing information technology solutions to rural villages.

When the US President shakes the hand of the Bangladeshi micro-banker at the White House ceremony this week, Mr. Obama will be touching his own past and the microfinance work his mother did in Indonesia. And when Professor Yunus opens the Microcredit Summit next April in Nairobi, Kenya, the micro-banker from Bangladesh will launch the next phase of microfinance in the birthplace of Mr. Obama’s father and throughout the continent.

President Obama should accompany Muhammad Yunus to that Summit in Kenya to join in the micro-banker’s most inspiring appeal—a daring call to put poverty in the museums where it belongs.

Yes we can!

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Sam Daley-Harris is Founder of the Microcredit Summit Campaign which seeks to reach 175 million poorest families with microcredit www.microcreditsummit.org and of RESULTS which seeks to create the political will to end poverty www.results.org.

Sam Daley-Harris, Founder

RESULTS and Microcredit Summit Campaign