Giving

INTRODUCTION

WHEN I LEFT the White House, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life giving my time, money, and skills to worthwhile endeavors where I could make a difference. I didn’t know exactly what I would do, but I wanted to help save lives, solve important problems, and give more young people the chance to live their dreams. I felt obligated to do it because of the wonderful, improbable life I’d been given by the American people and because politics, which consumed so much of my life, is a getting business. You have to get support, contributions, and votes, over and over again. If you serve well, it’s probably a fair trade, but no sensible person can do it as long as I did without thinking you still have to give more to balance the scales. Besides, I thought I’d enjoy it. Like many people who are fortunate to live full, rewarding lives, I reached a point in my journey where, apart from taking care of my family and being with them and my friends, what I cared most about was doing what I could to make sure people younger than me don’t die before their time and aren’t denied the chance to find their own fulfillment. After I narrowly escaped what could have been a fatal heart attack in 2004, I felt that way even more strongly.

This drive has led me into a wide variety of service projects, a number of which are chronicled in this book. It has also given me a far greater appreciation of the countless acts of giving I have witnessed all my life and sometimes have taken for granted. And it has convinced me that almost everyone—regardless of income, available time, age, and skills—can do something useful for others and, in the process, strengthen the fabric of our shared humanity.

Like most Americans of my generation, I first learned about giving in my church, where we were taught to tithe. Most kids my age also gave small amounts to the March of Dimes crusade against polio. After Billy Graham spoke to a racially integrated crusade in Little Rock when Central High School was closed in the fight over desegregation in 1958, I sent a small portion of my allowance to his ministry for a few months. In my teens, I did the usual volunteer work associated with school activities and helping the needy around Thanksgiving and Christmas.

When I was in my first year of college, I gave a little time to a community project Georgetown University ran in poor neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., and contributed to the occasional good cause, but I dedicated most of my free time to friends and campus activities. During my last two years of college, at Oxford, and at Yale Law School, I became obsessed with politics and gave very little time or money to anything else.

After I went home to Arkansas to teach law, I did some pro bono legal work and began to make small contributions to causes I was interested in. During the years I served as governor, I tried to set aside 10 percent of my income for giving: for my church, my alma maters, and worthy local projects like a shelter for abused women and children in our neighborhood. Because I was involved in politics from 1974 on, I didn’t give much time to other things.

Hillary was a different story. When I met her in law school, she was involved with a local project to provide legal services to poor people. She took an extra year to study the special needs of children at the Yale Child Study Center and the university hospital. When she graduated, she decided not to pursue prestigious and more lucrative law firm opportunities and went to work for the Children’s Defense Fund to help poor children. When she came to Arkansas to be with me and taught in the law school, she ran the legal aid clinic and prison project. After we married and moved to Little Rock, while I was attorney general and governor, she co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families; served on the board of our Children’s Hospital and helped with its fund-raising drive (it became one of the nation’s ten largest children’s hospitals in a state with only 2.8 million people); brought an excellent preschool program from Israel to poor families in our state; headed a task force that increased access to health care for people in small towns and rural areas; and chaired a committee that developed higher standards for our schools. She also served on an American Bar Association commission on the status of women in the profession. Somehow she made time for all these volunteer efforts while she was working full-time as a lawyer, active in her local church, and fully involved in all Chelsea’s school and extracurricular activities. My wife was my first role model for what it means to be a public servant without public office.

Hillary did the things she did because she wanted to make a difference. And she did them because it made her happy to see another baby in a small town get health care, another young child smiling at her preschool graduation ceremony, another student from a rural school become the first in his family to go to college, another woman break through the glass ceiling at a law firm.

Now that we’ve switched places and I do public service as a private citizen, it’s the human impact that I find most rewarding too. I’ve included one picture in this book, opposite the title page, that says it all. It captures the beautiful face and bright eyes of a Cambodian orphan born with HIV. Basil was ten months old when this photo was taken. His mother died when he was only one month old, and her doctor arranged for him to be taken in by New Hope for Cambodian Children, an organization that cares for HIV-positive orphans and other vulnerable children. When Basil arrived at the home, he was six weeks of age and had both HIV and tuberculosis. His doctor, a Clinton Foundation fellow, treated him for both conditions, giving Basil lifesaving pediatric AIDS medication through my foundation’s partnership with UNITAID, which funds our efforts to treat children across the globe. Basil responded well to the treatment, gained weight, and, as you can see, is now healthy. He has a chance. That’s often all one person can give another. But it can make all the difference.

I wrote this book to encourage you to give whatever you can, because everyone can give something. And there’s so much to be done, down the street and around the world. It’s never too late or too early to start. In this book you’ll encounter givers old, young, and in between, rich, poor, and in between, highly educated, virtually illiterate, and in between. You’ll read about innovative organizations, about new ways of giving time and money, and about old-fashioned acts of individual generosity and kindness. I think you’ll find people with whom you can identify, groups you might want to join, companies you might want to buy from, projects you might want to start on your own. It is impossible to mention all the individuals and organizations doing good work in America and around the world. There are millions of them. Naturally, many of those I mention in this book I happen to know personally, through the work of my foundation, but I hope the people and groups profiled are diverse and representative enough to persuade you that everyone can and should be a giver.

As you read about a wide range of givers—from Bill Gates to McKenzie Steiner, a six-year-old girl who organized a drive to clean up the beach in her community—I hope you’ll think about what you yourself can do. You’ll find information about how to get involved with the efforts described in the book or with other people doing the same kind of work, and you’ll find suggestions for doing something on your own or with your friends and neighbors. If you are especially interested in particular issues not covered, you’ll also find Web sites that will put you in touch with NGOs—nongovernmental organizations—working on them.

Martin Luther King once said, Everyone can be great because everyone can serve. I wrote this book to profile some great people and to encourage you to join their ranks.

ONE

The Explosion of Private Citizens Doing Public Good

IN EVERY CORNER of America and all over the world, intelligence and energy are evenly distributed, but opportunity, investment, and effective organizations aren’t. As a result, billions of people are denied the chance to live their lives to the fullest, and millions die needlessly every year.

Because we live in an interdependent world, we cannot escape each other’s problems. We are all vulnerable to terror, weapons of mass destruction, the spread of disease, and the potentially calamitous effects of climate change. The fact that one in four people who die this year will succumb to AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, or infections related to dirty water casts a pall over all our children’s future. As long as more than 100 million children in poor countries are not enrolled in school, there will be political and social instability, with global implications. There is a growing backlash against the global economy in both rich and poor nations where the economic growth it has stimulated has not been broadly shared. About half the world’s people still live on less than $2 a day. In the United States we have had five years of economic growth, worker productivity increases, and a forty-year high in corporate profits, but median wages are flat, and the poverty rate among working families has risen, as has the percentage of people without health insurance. Increased outsourcing of production and services has intensified insecurity. Most of the economic gains of this decade have gone to those people with the top 10 percent of incomes. And amidst all our wealth, there are people who are hungry, homeless, jobless, ill, disabled, desperate, isolated, and ignored. There are children with dreams that will die without a helping hand.

The modern world, for all its blessings, is unequal, unstable, and unsustainable. And so the great mission of the early twenty-first century is to move our neighborhoods, our nation, and the world toward integrated communities of shared opportunities, shared responsibilities, and a shared sense of genuine belonging, based on the essence of every successful community: that our common humanity is more important than our interesting differences.

Many of the problems that bedevil both rich and poor nations in the modern world cannot be adequately addressed without more enlightened government policies, more competent and honest public administration, and more investment of tax dollars. There is plenty of evidence that more effective government can produce higher incomes, better living conditions, more social justice, and a cleaner environment across the board. But in many areas, regardless of the quality of government, a critical difference is being made by citizens working as individuals, in businesses, and through nongovernmental nonprofit organizations. An NGO is any group of private citizens who join together to advance the public good.

When I left the White House in 2001, I hoped that through my foundation I could make such a difference and keep working to move our nation and the world away from poverty, disease, conflict, and climate change. I wanted to use my time, experience, and contacts to help in saving lives, solving problems, and empowering more people to achieve their goals.

For example, in 2002 the Clinton Foundation launched an HIV/AIDS initiative (CHAI), to help developing nations deal with AIDS by setting up effective health systems, including diagnosis, care, and treatment, and by providing vital antiretroviral medicines and essential testing at the lowest costs in the world.

Last year, in the Bahamas, the first country to participate in our effort, I had a reunion with two five-year-old twin girls and a spunky eighteen-year-old boy who were desperately ill when I first met them but are healthy now because of the low-cost medicine purchased through our project. Three years ago I learned of a Haitian girl who was so weak with AIDS she had to be carried to her desk at school; she was among the first to receive medicine when we went to work there. I have a recent picture of her standing tall and radiant in a formal dress. I have seen infants in Zanzibar, played with children from Yunnan Province in China, and held orphans in Cambodia who are receiving lifesaving medicine though our AIDS initiative. Our program now works in twenty-five countries to diagnose, test, and care for people with HIV/AIDS, and forty-four more nations are able to buy low-cost drugs and testing materials under our contract. As of mid-2007, about 750,000 more people are receiving treatment purchased under CHAI agreements, representing about a third of all those in the developing world receiving treatment today.

Our effort is only one of the tens of thousands of public-service projects now being pursued by NGOs, individuals, and businesses throughout the world. It is no accident that in 2005, Time magazine named as its persons of the year Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono, three people who hold no political office but have done great public good as private citizens. Among its wide-ranging good works, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent more than a billion dollars on health care in Africa and India, hundreds of millions to develop an AIDS vaccine and a preventive microbicidal gel, and more than $1.7 billion in the United States to develop globally competitive high schools. In 2000, Bono spearheaded an international movement to forgive the debts of the poorest countries. In 2005, he generated public support for British prime minister Tony Blair’s successful effort to secure a commitment from the world’s wealthiest nations to double aid to Africa and provide more debt relief. Today Bono is leading the ONE Campaign to enlist millions of Americans to support an investment of one percent of our gross domestic product to eliminate extreme poverty in the world.

In 2002, President Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize, largely for his work after leaving the White House in fighting to eradicate guinea worm and river blindness in Africa, helping poor nations to become self-sufficient in food production, promoting human rights, building homes with Habitat for Humanity, and monitoring elections in troubled democracies to make sure that all eligible citizens can vote and that their votes are counted.

In 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh for his pioneering work in founding Grameen Bank, which makes small loans to poor people, 97 percent of them women. In a nation with a per capita annual income of less than $500, the bank has made nearly seven million loans since 1983. Without requiring collateral or even a signed agreement, Grameen has an astonishing loan recovery rate of 98.3 percent, and has earned a profit in all but three years since it came into existence. In addition to enterprise loans at regular rates, which are financed out of its own deposits, the bank also runs life insurance and retirement savings programs, makes housing and education loans, and zero-interest loans to beggars, over 60 percent of which have already been paid off. When one of its borrowers dies, the branch manager attends the funeral and, before the burial, announces forgiveness of the outstanding debt. Perhaps most important, by early 2007, more than 58 percent of Grameen’s borrowers had lifted themselves above the poverty line. Their combined activities made a significant contribution to the 6.7 percent growth Bangladesh achieved last year in spite of ongoing political turmoil.

Over the last twenty-five years, Grameen’s success has inspired people all over the world. In the mid-1980s, Hillary and I raised funds to open a microcredit facility to spur development in rural Arkansas, based on the Grameen model and following the lead of ShoreBank in Chicago, which had pioneered the concept in America by making loans to local craftsmen to rehabilitate run-down buildings in a distressed area of Chicago’s South Side. During my White House years, I secured funds from Congress to support microcredit programs and establish community development banks in the United States, and to provide about two million microcredit loans a year in developing countries.

Today, millions of loans are being made every year by microcredit institutions funded by governments, banks, businesses, wealthy individuals, and NGOs. In mid-2007, the Department for International Development in the United Kingdom announced a plan to get banking and microcredit for half the world’s poorest people. Meanwhile, Opportunity International Australia, with support from the Gates Foundation, is giving all the clients of its microcredit bank in Malawi Malswitch cards that have fingerprint identification embedded on a chip to guarantee safe and secure access to credit for clients who aren’t literate. The cards will help Malawi reach the critical mass necessary not just to improve individual lives but to lift regional and national economies.

In 2004, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to another citizen activist, Wangari Maathai of Kenya, the first East African woman to earn a doctoral degree. She tells her story in her beautifully written memoir, Unbowed. Thirty years ago, she began a tree-planting effort to promote soil and water conservation, sustainable development, the empowerment of women, good governance, and peace. It grew into the Green Belt Movement, which has helped Kenyan women plant more than 30 million trees; then into the Pan African Green Network, which spread her model of conservation and community building across the continent; and finally into the Green Belt Movement International, which seeks to plant one billion trees over the next decade. In the last few years, Maathai has also launched initiatives to promote waste reduction and increased recycling; to protect the endangered Congo Basin forest ecosystem; and to use conservation to help achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.

The accomplishments of Muhammad Yunus and Wangari Maathai are both unique and representative of a global floodtide of NGO activity. In the United States, such citizen activism is older than our republic. Benjamin Franklin organized the first volunteer fire department in Philadelphia in 1736, forty years before our Declaration of Independence. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, noted the eagerness of Americans to band together in community groups to attack common problems, comparing it favorably to the inclination of Europeans to depend on the state to solve them. The Red Cross, the United Way, and our civic clubs have been around a long time.

What makes the current movement remarkable is the sheer number and global sweep of such efforts, from the multibillion-dollar Gates Foundation to groups like the Self Employed Women’s Association in India, which makes small loans to poor village women to start or expand businesses.

There are several reasons for this explosion of citizen service. First, since the end of the Cold War, for the first time in history a majority of the world’s people are living under elected governments, which create more opportunities for democratic societies and citizen activism to develop. And because of the global mass media culture and leaders’ unavoidable sensitivity to public opinion, even nondemocratic governments find it increasingly difficult