It’s simple. Build homes, create order and stability, offer nourishing food, and start teaching the kids. This isn’t rocket science—it just needs commitment, expertise, and action.

It’s sustainable. Kids not only receive food, clothing, water, and shelter—they receive education and the entrepreneurial skills to become financially independent and, perhaps, to build other villages. In other words, they learn that they have value as human beings with futures. They learn there is hope.

It’s fast. Within a year, we can have the village up and running, using a combination of Lift Kids volunteer expertise, expertise from people on the ground, and expertise from our philanthropic and corporate partners.

It’s replicable. We call it philanthropic franchising: The same model guiding us in a Bangladeshi ghetto can be applied in the African bush. The principles are the same, the values and goals and processes—they’re all the same. This makes it fast and easy both to deliver consistent success and to best leverage initial investments for multiple worldwide returns.

It’s exponential. The more partners we have, the more villages we can build successively, the more kids we can lift, the more seeds of stability and sustainability we can plant, the more hope we can grow. And every kid we lift sets off a chain reaction for generations of change.

It's micro-entrepreneurialism. The success of Grameen Bank who, with founder Muhammad Yunus, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize is just one example of the paradigm shift underway in the world of philanthropy. When you put power into people's hands--even small loans to the poorest of the poor--they thrive. What we're doing is empowering kids with micro seed capital, under a similar model of smallness, so someday they can put a  micro-credit loan to good use.