International hunger activist plans talk in Rapid City

from the Rapid City Journal

By Journal staff

Sam Daley-Harris, founder of RESULTS, an international citizens lobby with a goal of creating the political will to end hunger and poverty, will meet with and speak to local residents at South Park United Church of Christ in Rapid City at 7 p.m. Thursday.

Daley-Harris and other organizers hope to start a RESULTS chapter in Rapid City.

Daley-Harris founded RESULTS 27 years ago. There are now 100 chapters in the United States and chapters in six other countries.

Daley-Harris also organized the November 2006 Global Microcredit Summit with delegates from 112 countries, including the prime minister of Pakistan, the president of Honduras, the Queen of Spain, and the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank.

The bank makes very small loans to people in poverty to allow them to make and sell their wares and build a financial future. RESULTS has been a champion of Grameen Bank-style microloans, which have been made to more than 100 million people.

The group also said its lobbying has helped reduce the world's child death rate, which has declined from 41,000 a day 20 years ago to fewer than 28,000 a day now.

"In early 2006, as I stared my 60th birthday in the face, I began to wonder what difference I could make over the next 10 years," Daley-Harris wrote in a recent letter. "It became clear that creating champions for the end of poverty is what is most urgently required. While sponsoring a child or building a school is important, it's not sufficient to ensure the Millennium Development Goals are achieved, and just having supporters in Congress, not champions, is also insufficient to the task."

For more information about RESULTS, go to www.results.org. For more information about the meeting, call 348-7499.