This Saturday, April 5th from 5-8 p.m. Globalhood project Global Potential is hosting a unique fundraiser at the Casa Frela Art Gallery (47 W. 119th St. in Harlem). Entrance fee is $50, $30 for students. Guests will be invited to bid on a variety of art donated by local and international artists, while enjoying cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.

All proceeds will benefit Global Potential, a program that empowers low-income, minority youth to create positive change in their own communities and those around the world. Ten at-risk high school students have been chosen to participate in the program this year, which involves providing them with extensive training in a vocation of their choice, as well as mentoring and leadership training. The students will travel to a rural village in the Dominican Republic this summer and apply their newly-acquired skills to aid in the betterment of the community. Upon their return home, the students will use social entrepreneurial models to become catalysts for positive social change in their own communities.

Tickets may be purchased in advance at http://globalhood.org/

The following is a guest post by Ariel Rojas, President and Founder of Transdiaspora Network. 

Back in May 2007, when the idea to create Transdiaspora Network came to my dreams, it had all the elements of a big utopia. My daily interaction with HIV positive individuals (West Indians, Latinos, African-Americans) has given me a sense of urgency and has made me a witness to the effects of the HIV epidemic that pervade every aspect of family members’ lives – their emotional well-being, physical security, mental development and overall health. This helped me appreciate even more the importance of forging new alliances and strategies to better help under-served social groups and to promote good quality services.

As Transdiaspora Network’s founder, I got the primary vision to transform negative facts into positive outcomes [(–) x (–) = (+)] and I wanted to make our organization a good vehicle to bring more culturally meaningful solutions to the community on the HIV prevention topic. The Brooklyn-based Caribbean communities have three big challenges to tackle before it is too late. First, the

HIV infection rate among youth is getting astonishingly higher every year. Second, Caribbean-descendent youth are not engaged at large in HIV prevention activities within their own communities. Third, the youth population faces barriers to access culturally-oriented

solutions through the current biomedical and individualist approach on HIV prevention.

Transdiaspora Network is connected to the future because the youngest generation is holding those solutions we are looking for. Our main goal is not only to prevent HIV among at-risk Caribbean-descendent youth, but as social service professionals we also have the duty to be more innovative using the concepts of culture and tradition. We cannot do less than promote an inclusive environment in our approach.

If you want to foster the development of a distintive HIV prevention system, visit our website www.transdiasporanetwork.org and get enrolled as a volunteer. Don’t react, make a connection. 

While skimming through a recent Global Development Executive Briefing, I came across this brief announcement—President George W. Bush has said the U.S. will help provide 5.2 million mosquito nets as part of a broader campaign to tackle malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. Bush announced the plan during a visit to a hospital in Arusha, Tanzania, where he is on the second leg of a tour of five African countries. He said it would provide free nets for every Tanzanian child aged one to five. Malaria is the main cause of death for children in Africa, killing a child every 30 seconds, the United Nations says. The U.S., Tanzania, and the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria will distribute the nets.

Washington-based, nonprofit group Population Services International (PSI) has had significant success with this exact mission, through its own innovative system for distributing bed nets in Malawi.

Here’s some quick background: In 2000, PSI created a supply and demand program that prompted the number of Malawian children (under the age of five) sleeping under bed nets to increase from 8 percent in 2000 to 55 percent in 2004. PSI stocked antenatal clinics with bed nets, which the clinics sold for 50 cents to destitute mothers who populate the clinics. The clinics retained a percentage of the value of the nets for themselves, which stimulated them to keep the nets in stock. Simultaneously, PSI sold nets to more affluent Malawians for 5 dollars a net. The proceeds were used to compensate for the nets sold below their value at the clinics. Voila, the program pays for itself.

The success of the program is a direct derivative of the multidisciplinary approach that PSI took when executing this project. They looked at the big picture. Instead of simply mass distributing the nets, PSI created a system of supply and demand. They assessed the economical and social structure of the country and effectively developed the most beneficial way not only to get their product to those who needed it, but to create a system that sustained itself. It ensured that those who needed the nets got them, and those that didn’t did not, thus preventing significant monetary loss on their end from mass distribution. It also arguably stimulated the system to grow exponentially, requiring minimal interference from PSI.

So, eight years after the beginning of a very successful program to distribute bed nets to a country with a similar social, economical, and environmental profile, Bush announces that 5.2 million bed nets will be mass distributed, for free, to children under five.

Why are we not mimicking PSI’s system, a system that’s already been proven highly successful? Or better yet, why aren’t we enlisting PSI to repeat a similar program for the Tanzania project? I’d like to think we’ve got some even better, innovative idea that is a morph of PSI’s concept, one that will secure this project as even more of a success, but I balk at giving us that much credit. It begs the question: If it ain’t broke…why are we fixing it?

I’ve been out of the country for a while which may explain the recent lack of blogging. As it happens, I’m still out of the country and so reading the IHT instead of the New York Times. Thusly, I was not aware of  this article, which I think ran in last Sunday’s New York Times. So, Rem Koolhaas is hoping to build a non-city within a city in Dubai. In the article Nicolai Ouroussoff, which you should read now before continuing, presents the idea that this sort of development might cater to only a small global elite. Really, you think? I’m not condemning the rich for luxuriating rather than attempting to save the world, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that massive architectural projects such as this are utterly and viciously boring: hypermodern non-places, stripped of any organic of evolutionary structure. For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding such projects–Atlantic Yards , which is located in my back yard comes to mind–they’re really nothing more than an attempted synchronization of suburban planning and urban scale: sterile, lacking anything resembling charm, violent by the fact of their existence. As far as I’m concerned, this sort of remapping of urban space into monadic unity runs entirely contrary to Globalhood’s commitment to engaging difference qua difference: real, deep, difficult and highly necessary. If every street, corridor and arcade is the same as the next, why should I leave my house in the morning?