Download Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World AudioBook Free
Here, from Bill Clinton, is a proactive approach. Giving is an inspiring look at how each folks can change the entire world. First, it reveals the extraordinary and innovative efforts now being created by companies and organizations—and by individuals—to solve problems and save lives both “down the street and around the world.” Then it urges us to search out what each folks, “no matter income, available time, age, and skills,” can do to help, to give people an opportunity to live out their dreams.
Bill Clinton shares his own experiences and the ones of other givers, representing a worldwide flood tide of nongovernmental, nonprofit activity. These remarkable stories demonstrate that gifts of the time, skills, things, and ideas are as important and effective as contributions of money. From Bill and Melinda Gates to a six-year-old California girl named McKenzie Steiner, who organized and supervised drives to clean the beach in her community, Clinton introduces us to both well-known and unknown heroes of giving. Included in this:
Dr. Paul Farmer, who grew up moving into the family bus in a trailer park, vowed to devote his life to giving high-quality health care to the poor and has generated innovative public health-care clinics first in Haiti and then in Rwanda;
a NY couple, in Africa for a wedding, who visited several schools in Zimbabwe and were appalled by the lack of textbooks and school supplies. They founded their own organization to gather and ship materials to thirty-five schools. After three years, the percentage of seventh-graders who pass reading tests increased from 5 percent to 60 percent;'
Oseola McCarty, who after seventy-five many years of eking out a full time income by washing and ironing, gave $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for African-American students;
Andre Agassi, who has generated a school preparatory academy in the NEVADA neighborhood with the city’s highest percentage of at-risk kids. “Tennis was a stepping-stone for me,” says Agassi. “Changing a child’s life is what I always wanted to do”;
Heifer International, which gave twelve goats to a Ugandan village. Within the year, Beatrice Biira’s mother had earned enough money selling goat’s milk to pay Beatrice’s school fees and eventually to send all her children to school—and, as required, to pass on your baby goat to another family, thus multiplying the impact of the gift.
Clinton writes about women and men who traded in their corporate careers, and the fulfillment they now experience through giving. He writes about energy-efficient practices, about progressive companies going green, about promoting fair wages and decent working conditions throughout the world. He shows us how one of the main ways of giving is definitely an effort to change, improve, or protect a government policy. He outlines that which you as individuals can do, the steps we may take, how much we have to consider giving, and why our giving is so important.
Bill Clinton’s own actions in his post-presidential years have had an enormous impact on the lives of millions. Through his foundation and his work in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, he has become an international spokesperson and model for the energy of giving.
“We all have the capability to do great things,” President Clinton says. “My hope would be that the people and stories in this book will lift spirits, touch hearts, and demonstrate that citizen activism and service can be a powerful agent of change in the entire world.”
