* Community Education Development: Working to eliminate illiteracy, BFT Center provides community education through the improvement of the quality of teaching and learning. BFT has set up a program that aims to develop schools and communities as a whole, which is put into practice through inclusive education, community participation for those who do not attend school (including non school age children), and adult literacy and life skills training.

* Child Support Center: BFT Center believes that orphans and poor children deserve to grow up in a safe and secure environment in a dignified manner. BFT uses donations to provide public school education, food, shelter, clothing (including school uniforms), health service and entertainment for these children.

* Community Health/Nutrition Development: BFT Center has achieved outstanding progress in improving nutrition, hygiene, sanitation, and overall health in the communities it serves. Activities such as health education classes for parents, school garden projects, and providing energizing breakfasts and vitamin supplements to poor school children are all part of this project.

* Community Peace Building: Working on this project in conjunction with local monks, BFT Center works to reduce family violence. BFT provides moral education classes and access to a strong support group that offers counseling through times of hardship and crisis. It also promotes family integration.

* Community Capacity Building & Livelihood Improvement: This project focuses on providing life and business skills training along with seed funding and micro-finance loans to help build a family business and break the poverty for individuals who otherwise would not have the opportunity to provide a sustainable income for their families. In turn this allows children to go to school and get an education.

Click here to see BFT’s “Wish List” to see what your donations can fund.

BFT Center is building successful partnerships in the United States with such projects as Austin2Angkor and GlobeMed at University of Virginia. Become a Friend of BFT and watch as the communities we serve grow and thrive!

For more information, visit the Build Your Future Today website at www.center-bft.org

DONATE ONLINE: Make an online donation of $10 or more. Add the amount you wish to donate in the box provided below.

Amount of Donation (US$):

Clicking “Donate Now” will take you to a secure page to complete a credit card contribution.

OTHER WAYS TO GIVE: Make a donation by check, wire transfer or securities transfer. Click here to learn more.

Give2Asia currently provides fiscal sponsorship to over 140 world-class organizations in Asia, helping them build their programs, expand their impact, and further develop Asia’s nonprofit sector.

“By providing aborigine youth with education, training, and employment opportunities in the arts, culture, and eco-tourism sectors in Taidong, Alliance hopes to help these young people find self-confidence and realize their potentials, thereby allowing the aborigine minority to find a voice for their cultural identity and a stage for their talents,” said Stanley Yen, Chairman of The Alliance Cultural Foundation. “By preserving Taidong’s rich cultural heritage and unsurpassed natural beauty, young people will be able to restore their family unity, re-build their homes and find dignity as productive individuals.”

The Alliance Cultural Foundation has served the Hualien-Taidong region of Taiwan since 2009. It provides tuition-free education to students from economically disadvantaged families through the Junyi School for Innovative Learning, consulting services for indigenous businesses, and employment training for local youth.

Supporters of The Alliance Cultural Foundation can now donate online by visiting http://www.give2asia.org/alliancetw.

DESH DESHPANDE

Lunch Keynote Speaker & Award Recipient
Dr. Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande is a world-class venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He currently acts as the President and Chairman of Sparta Group LLC and Chairman of A123 Systems (AONE), Sycamore Networks (SCMR), Tejas Networks and HiveFire. Prior to co-founding Sycamore Networks, he was founder and chairman of Cascade Communications. Desh serves on the boards of MIT, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Global Board, Akshayapatra and several other non-profit organizations.

Among Desh’s innovative philanthropic contributions is the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT, which has worked for a decade to increase the impact of MIT technologies in the marketplace. Following the success of the Deshpande Center at MIT, Desh and his wife Jaishree have helped establish three other innovative centers around the world: Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship in India, Merrimack Valley Social Entrepreneurship Sandbox in Massachusetts, and Pond-Deshpande Center at the University of New Brunswick in Canada.

In 2010, Desh was appointed Co-Chair of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship by President Barack Obama to develop policies that foster entrepreneurship, create jobs and drive economic growth.

Jaishree Deshpande

Award Recipient
In 1996, Jaishree and her husband, Desh, co-founded The Deshpande Foundation as an umbrella for their global efforts in philanthropy and social entrepreneurship. Through their foundation, the Deshpandes foster social entrepreneurship by supporting a variety of charitable organizations in the areas of health, education, microcredit and agriculture.

Among the contributions of the Deshpande Foundation is the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT, which Jaishree and Desh founded in 2002.  Since then, the Deshpandes have established three more innovative research centers around the world.

Jaishree Desphande is currently the Treasurer of Sparta Group LLC. She also serves as a Trustee for the Museum of Science and supports quality after school programming for low-income children through the HESTIA Fund.

Before moving to Canada in 1980, Jaishree worked for the Indian Space Research Organization in Bangalore, India. She received a Master of Science in Physics in 1975 from the Indian Institute of Technologies (IIT), Madras, India and a second Master in Computer Science in 1989 from Boston University.

Jed Emerson

Awards Gala Keynote Speaker
Jed Emerson is an internationally recognized thought leader in sustainability, sustainable finance, impact investing, social entrepreneurship and strategic philanthropy and has authored four books in these fields. Currently, Emerson holds high-level positions around the globe, such as Chief Strategist at ImpactAssets; Senior Advisor to The Sterling Group, The River Star Group, IML Group and the Piton Foundation; Senior Fellow at the University of Heidelberg’s Center for Social Investing; and a Clinical Professor at NYU-Abu Dhabi.

Emerson’s career has spanned the diverse fields of management, academia, investing, and human services. He has launched nonprofit ventures, led foundation initiatives, and engaged in research assessing global innovations in sustainable investing and finance. Emerson has played founder roles with some of the nation’s leading venture philanthropy, community venture capital, and social enterprises including serving as Managing Director for Integrated Performance at Uhuru Capital, Senior Fellow with Generation Investment Management Foundation, and Project Manager with the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.

Mr. Emerson has written extensively about blended value, performance metrics, and capital investment strategies seeking multiple returns.

In early 2001, he began focusing on the Blended Value Proposition and he spends much of his time addressing conferences, students, and practitioners. Mr. Emerson has presented at numerous conferences and events both nationally and internationally including the World Economic Forum in Davos; the Caisse de Depots in Paris; and the London Business School and Oxford University in England. Among United States based academic institutions, he has presented his work at Harvard, Yale, UNC, Northwestern, and UCLA.

Emerson’s written work can be found at www.blendedvalue.org. He recently released his new book, “Impact Investing: Transforming How We Make Money While Making a Difference.”

Sébastien Marot

Session Speaker
Sebastien Marot is the founder and Director of Friends International, a social enterprise started in 1994 to reintegrate homeless children in Phnom Penh, Cambodia back into society. Since then, Friends International has brought its model of education, job training and small for-profit enterprises to Indonesia, Laos and Thailand and will soon expand to Myanmar and Honduras.

Born in France, Marot holds a degree in political science and served two years in the French Consulate in Japan. He returned to Asia in 1994 to visit Cambodia. Shaken by the luxury vehicles speeding past sleeping homeless children on the streets of Phnom Penh, Marot and his traveling companions soon decided to open Friends, a shelter for disadvantaged Cambodian children that served as a place for transition and reintegration into society.

Since founding Friends, Marot and the organization have helped hundreds of thousands of children across Southeast Asia.

Scott Rozelle

Session Speaker
Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of the Rural Education Action Program in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. REAP takes on the twin challenge of the higher education gap in China – addressing both the social need of providing assistance to the rural poor and the absence of academic research that can aid scholars and policymakers to understand the problem and come up with creative policy solutions.

Rozelle received his BS from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MS and PhD from Cornell University.

Previously, Rozelle was a professor at the University of California, Davis and an assistant professor in Stanford’s Food Research Institute and department of economics. He currently is a member of several organizations, including the American Economics Association, the International Association for Agricultural Economists, and the Association for Asian Studies. Rozelle also serves on the editorial boards of Economic Development and Cultural Change, Agricultural Economics, the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and the China Economic Review.

His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with: agricultural policy, including the supply, demand, and trade in agricultural projects; the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and their implications for equity and efficiency; and the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition.

We are participating in Singapore Sundown Marathon to raise money for charity. The idea is to live our credo and give back to the APAC community. We’ve signed up as a group to the Singapore Sundown Marathon, taking place on the 26th of May and will run/walk 10km to 42km to raise money for a school in India, called “Khushi”.

“Khushi” means Happiness and Joy in Hindi. The school’s mission is to spread “Khushi” in the lives of children dealing with developmental disabilities such as autism, cerebral palsy and mental retardation.

Founded by Dr. Reena Singh, who is a mother of an autistic child, the school has helped more than 60,000 children in the past ten years. Due to very limited resources, the school is not able to cater to all children that need therapy and as a result have children on a waiting list or worse, still have to turn children away. The children need help! They call for respect and love like all the other kids around the World. We are not regular runners and many of us are running a marathon for the first time, but we would like to run for this great cause. We seek your support/sponsorship for this event. You may make a donation via this webpage and Give2Asia, a US registered charity organization, which will make an advised grant directly to the school for autistic children. We are ready to run, and we run, because we care! Amanda Yuan

DONATE ONLINE: Make an online donation of $10 or more. Add the amount you wish to donate in the box provided below. Amount of Donation (US$): Clicking “Donate Now” will take you to a secure page to complete a credit card contribution. OTHER WAYS TO GIVE: Make a donation by check, wire transfer or securities transfer. Click here to learn more.

The Runners Kelly Chesney Rosina Wickart Harjinder Singh Victoria Veloso Ilse Daelman Rashmeet Sangari Arun Bansal Symond Lim Grace Evangelista Ambar Arif Amanda Yuan William Bao Amy Gao Zhi Hao Lim Benny Lu Jolene Huang Isha Gupta Derek Burr Kris Van Nijen Philipp Wickart Henry Chan Randy Desir Satoshi Daigo Ploy-Juda Kunpanitchakit Bryan Jiang Indrajeet Bhosale Prashanth Narasimhan

]]> http://give2asia.org/?feed=rss2&p=15341 0 http://give2asia.org/?p=13536 http://give2asia.org/?p=13536#comments Wed, 09 May 2012 19:12:31 +0000 Give2Asia http://give2asia.org/?p=13536 Please click here to visit our blog at asianphilanthropy.org.

]]> http://give2asia.org/?feed=rss2&p=13536 0 http://give2asia.org/?p=15328 http://give2asia.org/?p=15328#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 23:23:25 +0000 Give2Asia http://give2asia.org/?p=15328 View and download our overview on Community Foundation partnership. Click here if the document does not load automatically.

]]> http://give2asia.org/?feed=rss2&p=15328 0 http://give2asia.org/?p=15314 http://give2asia.org/?p=15314#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 22:53:57 +0000 Give2Asia http://give2asia.org/?p=15314 View and download our current overview on the Alliance. Click here if the document does not load automatically.

]]> http://give2asia.org/?feed=rss2&p=15314 0 http://give2asia.org/fy11-report http://give2asia.org/fy11-report#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 19:24:47 +0000 Give2Asia http://give2asia.org/?p=15291 Our FY2011 Annual Report describes Give2Asia’s work, financial results, project highlights, grant recipients and donor funds. Click here if the document does not load automatically.

FY2011 DONORS, FUNDS & GRANTEES
Click here to view our Annual Report Addendum listing FY2011 funds, grantees and donor advisors.

]]> http://give2asia.org/?feed=rss2&p=15291 0