The new philanthropists: Silicon Valley teens

Meredith May, Chronicle Staff WriterMonday, July 14, 2008New(07-13) 19:57 PDT – A group of Kenyan orphans is tasting milk for the first time. On a train platform in India, teachers are giving lessons to children whose families force them to beg from passengers.And in Thailand, health workers are showing Burmese refugees how reduce their chances of contracting HIV.All three projects are largely funded by Bay Area students.Meet the new philanthropists – Silicon Valley teens with innate computer networking skills, affluent family connections and the one-click ability to bear witness to global poverty.“Their sense of justice is different than ours growing up,” said Sue Schwartzman of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund, whose youth foundation gave away $204,000 in global charity in June. A portion funded the train station schools in India.“I think a lot of Bay Area kids understand that their lives are great and when they see these pictures from around the world it’s not OK. They want to make other young people’s lives OK, too,” Schwartzman said.The nature of youth activism is becoming increasingly global, said Robert Rhoads, who teaches a course in student activism at UCLA. “It’s a direct result of our increased communication systems, our easier access to global travel, and more contact with international students in schools and universities,” he said.This generation of high schoolers became painfully aware of global politics as middle schoolers on 9/11. They are also the first set of students to be taught by teachers who were required to do community service in order to get a high school diploma. That lesson of giving back, or paying it forward, is becoming part of their psyche.From Facebook’s “One” clickable charity campaign to Al Gore’s inconvenient truths or U2 frontman Bono’s Product Red push for Africa, this generation is steeped in a popular culture of giving.“I think deep in their bones 9/11 showed them that something is wrong with our culture, that we can’t solve the world’s problems anymore with individual competition and self-interest,” said Robert Freeman, a history teacher at Los Altos High who last year started a charitable nonprofit with his students, One Dollar for Life.Borrowing the simple church collection plate strategy, the students started collecting dollars in their own school and neighboring Silicon Valley schools to raise money for global causes.In 18 months, they raised nearly $26,000 from students, enough to build a classroom for Kenyan children who were going to school in a horse barn, put 60 desks in an empty classroom in Malawi, buy two milk cows for a Kenyan orphanage and ship 452 bicycles to Africa so children wouldn’t have to walk for miles to get to school.This year, the students helped prevent young girls from a life of sexual slavery in Nepal. They raised enough to buy 20 piglets for the Nepal Youth Opportunity Foundation, which gives parents the animals to try to dissuade them from selling their girls to brothels. Once the piglets mature, the parents can sell the pig for $50 – as much or more than sex traffickers would pay for their daughters. Several of Freeman’s students returned this month from another project in Nepal, where they finished construction on a three-room school for 84 primary students who were attending class under a tree.“It’s astonishing to see what happens when the students realize that their choices are between the regular or video iPod, between Juicy jeans or True Religion, and then they meet people who have to decide which child to feed,” Freeman said.While building the classroom for Naro Moru Secondary School in Kenya, the Silicon Valley students visited the sprawling Kibera slums in Nairobi. A Kenyan youth led them over a gutter and through a hole to host them in his 10-by-10 foot wooden shack.“I was worried about how the American kids would react,” said Macheru Karuku, director of SEANET, the Kenyan nonprofit that oversaw the school construction project.“I was encouraged when I talked with them later and they realized how lucky they were to be living in good houses back in America, adding that they would never forget what they had seen,” he said.Teen giving is expanding beyond the privilege of the privileged.This year, the John and Marcia Goldman Foundation of Brentwood gave $10,000 to Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto to start Project Give.The middle school students, the majority of whom come from low-income families, spent the year researching nonprofits before deciding to parse the money among Bay Area charities dedicated to cancer, AIDS and leukemia prevention.The sixth-graders were inspired to host an auction and buffet and recycle cans to raise an additional $350. Project Give was such a hit that the students are already geared up to fundraise again when school starts.Their next big cause?

Africa.

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