Category Archives: Personal Empowerment

Melinda Gates at the Clinton Global Initiative on September 24, 2014 in New York City.

John Moore/Getty Images

In its annual letter published Tuesday, the Gates Foundation reports on the impact of its initiative to get contraception into the hands of women around the world. Placing contraceptives alongside vaccines as one of the greatest lifesaving innovations in history, Bill and Melinda Gates write that 300 million women in developing countries now have access to modern contraception, about a 50 percent increase from 13 years ago.

Christina Cauterucci is a Slate staff writer.

The foundation is part of Family Planning 2020, a coalition of government agencies that seeks to get contraception access for 390 million women in the developing world by 2020. Meeting that goal is essential to a lot more than womens personal and economic empowerment: It would be a giant step toward mitigating global poverty. No country in the last 50 years has emerged from poverty without expanding access to contraceptives, the letter states, because the ability to avoid or space out pregnancies allows families to keep their kids in school, earn more income, and require less financial assistance from the government.

Melinda Gates attributes her own personal and professional success to birth control in a companion essay she published in Fortune. It's no accident that my three kids were born three years apartor that I didn't have my first child until I'd finished graduate school and devoted a decade to my career atMicrosoft, Gates writes. My family, my career, my life as I know it are all the direct result of contraceptives.

But outside the U.S. and other wealthy nations with advanced medical systems and reproductive health care, access to birth control can be a matter of life and death, Gates writes, crediting family-planning services with keeping 124,000 women alive in 2016. Without reliable contraception, women and children are less likely to be healthy and more likely to perish during or after childbirth. In the areas where the Gates Foundation focuses its work, spacing out children by at least three years doubles the chance of a childs survival to age 1.

In a better world, this kind of unambiguous data would engender widespread support for programs that give women the resources they need to determine for themselves when, whether, and how they give birth. In our actual world, Donald Trump reinstated and expanded the global gag rule, which cuts U.S. funding from any organization that provides abortion care, information, or referrals, even though U.S. aid already cant go toward abortion care itself. This means some of the worlds most comprehensive, far-reaching programs in the reproductive health sphere are now ineligible for U.S. aid money. Previous research has connected the rule to spikes in unplanned pregnancies and, ironically, abortion rates in sub-Saharan Africa. Gates essay predicts that Trumps reinstatement of the gag rule will bump up the number of women who want to prevent pregnancy but dont have access to contraception, a statistic that currently sits at 225 million women worldwide.

There are some novel products and programs that show promise in tackling that gap. A Pathfinder International initiative in Burkina Faso to supply clinics with and educate women about intrauterine devices has been so successful, the organization recently got a $10 million grant from the Gates Foundation to study how best to arm women with the family-planning tools they need. The foundations annual letter also expresses excitement for a new injectable contraceptive that rural women can administer themselves, providing protection from pregnancy for three months at a time. Proponents of the global gag rule will be happy to know that such advances in contraception technology and access have at least one desired effect that abortion restrictions dont: lower rates of unplanned pregnancies and abortion.

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Melinda Gates Credits Contraception With Her Personal and Professional Success - Slate Magazine (blog)

Its hard to believe that its only been a year since cult-status Milk Makeup first burst onto the scene. A brand on the forefront of gender fluidity, self-expression, and inclusivity, they certainly breed more of a lifestyle than your average cosmetics brand.

In celebration of their very first birthday, Milk Makeup is introducing Live Your Look, a campaign that exudes the brands core values. Over the past year, its been amazing to see how truly broad our audience isfrom male to female, old to young, bare to full face. We gave a wide range of people the license to their own unique brand of confidence through their look, says co-founder and creative director, Georgie Greville. The common denominator between everyone is not one look or product, its a lifestyletheyre all unique and they all do what they want; they arent afraid to play.

Kicking off Live Your Look, which is all about embracing the journey to self-discovery, is an anthem video starring creatives such as mask-donning artist Leikeli47; influencer and Milk Makeup employee Chelsea March; and makeup artist, painter, and cat eye-loving mom Bethany McCarty. Each embodies Milk Makeups values, emanating self-expression while encouraging others to do the same.

Now, more than ever, its time to really appreciate that everyone is a part of the spectrum of individuality, says Greville on the importance of the campaigns message. There should be no rules for how you express the unique person you are, and were here to help you do thateven if its in a totally new way every day. We want to spread a movement of personal empowerment, equality, and freedom of self-expression. If the world felt as free and inclusive as a Milk Makeup party, we would be in a really good place.

The campaign coincides with the brands spring launchesincluding the must-have Blur Stick (which Greville dubs a game-changer, and we couldn't agree more)which are all available now at MilkMakeup.com, Sephora.com, and UrbanOutfitters.com.

Check out the Live Your Look video, below, and be sure to live your own looks and tag #LiveYourLook on Instagram. @MilkMakeup will be posting their favorites all year long.

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Milk Makeup Is Celebrating Its Anniversary With A New Campaign - NYLON

SOUTH HOLLAND, IL (ENEWSPF)February 14, 2017. South Suburban College (SSC) proudly announces Caprice OBryant as the Keynote Speaker for the 2017 Chicago Womens Conference on Friday, March 17th located at the colleges Main Campus in South Holland, Illinois. This years theme You Can! marks the 9th annual event planned through the colleges Business and Career Institute (BCI). Women of all backgrounds ages 18 and up are welcome to come together for one day dedicated exclusively to women.

This years keynote, Caprice OBryant, is a walking miracle. Two serious injuries and a major illness couldnt keep her down. After her recovery, this dynamic 23-year-old entrepreneur earned her certification as a nutrition specialist through the National Academy of Sports Medicine, opened Excuse Free Fitness, Inc. in downtown Homewood, Illinois and has appeared on numerous television talk shows including You & Me This Morning and Windy City Live. Caprices motto is, You can do ALL things! which has inspired her followers to get healthy, increase their confidence and connect with their inner power. Caprices message of hope, perseverance and courage will have you believing in your own capabilities!

The positive feedback and participation has grown tremendously since the events inception. Last year over 350 participants and 50 vendors participated in this truly unique opportunity. SSC invites all women to join in the experience and connect with hundreds of other women this March.

In addition to an exciting Keynote from Ms. OBryant, this years event will again include networking, shopping, and will present over 15 speakers on topics including Personal Empowerment, Health & Wellness, and Business & Finance, along with a We Can panel that will feature a poignant discussion with powerful women who rose to the challenge and are making profound differences in their communities.

The cost of admission is just $25 per person with advance registration, or $35 at the door. The conference fee includes a continental breakfast, lunch, and admission to all of the break-out sessions.

For more information, or to register for the 2017 Chicago Womens Conference, please call (708) 596-2000, ext. 6055 or visit http://www.TheChicagoWomensConference.com. SSC is located at 15800 South State Street, South Holland, Illinois.

Source: http://ssc.edu

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2017 Chicago Women's Conference & Expo Coming to South Suburban College on March 17th - eNews Park Forest

Forbes

5 Steps To Validate Your Business Idea Before Getting Started Forbes For example, if you value health and personal empowerment, you might serve yoga studios. 2. Speak To Real People Within The Scope Of Who You Want To Serve. Once you've figured out who you want to help, get in touch with them. This will take your ...

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5 Steps To Validate Your Business Idea Before Getting Started - Forbes

British-born Sebastian Gorka was appointed as Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States by Donald Trump in January and is viewed as one of the key figures behind the Presidents national security strategy. Steve Fuller presents an analysis of Gorkas world-view, writing that his conception of an ideological struggle between Islamic jihadism and the West may ultimately be difficult to square with the views of Trumps core supporters, who have a sharper focus on territorial integrity and the material security of American citizens.

When one thinks of who might be the mastermind behind Donald Trumps presidency, Steve Bannon of Breitbart and fake news fame is the obvious candidate. However, arguably a deeper thinker in the same mould is Sebastian Gorka, Trumps deputy assistant and an increasingly familiar face to television audiences, as he offers asserts may be a better word straightforward justifications for the byzantine turns in Trumps policy initiatives. What follows is my presentation of Gorkas world-view, which is by no means crazy but not so easy to square with the world-view of the seemingly solid block of 40% of Americans who back Trump because they think their material security is his primary concern. In any case, it helps to begin with some history.

The Cold War was often portrayed as a struggle between competing ideologies, capitalism and socialism. Its original master thinker, George Kennan, believed that it was a struggle without end, since the two ideologies are irreconcilable: Both demand global domination and each has its own way of legitimising this demand. Indeed, they do so in ways that could appeal to members of the other side, given a fair hearing. So there are only two possible strategies for each side: either destroy or contain the other (i.e. simply block its spread). Destruction, while technically feasible with nuclear weapons, could also result in mutually assured destruction, so containment would be the more sensible option to lead with.

However, for all practical purposes, the Cold Wars so-called ideological struggle was really between the United States and the Soviet Union, two nation-states, each of which amassed other nation-states in various political, economic, military and cultural alliances. The Cold War was transacted in state-minted currency, which in turn was spent to fund an arms race and a space race that was claimed to have universal import.

But contra Kennan, the Cold War came to an end less than a half-century after it started. One of the anchor nation-states, the Soviet Union, had effectively gone bankrupt and sought a peaceful exit strategy, which the US clumsily managed. The so-called ideological struggle between capitalism and socialism ended at that point, notwithstanding pockets of resistance in places like Cuba. Other nation-states, most noticeably China, had no problem adapting its own geopolitical conduct to the newly relaxed capitalism-socialism divide.

Gorkas world-view begins with the claim that today the Wests struggle against Islamic jihadism is a much more literal version of a Kennan-style ideological struggle than Kennan himself had envisaged the Cold War to be. This is because at least one of the parties to the struggle is not defined in nation-state terms. Islamic jihadists are emboldened by certain radical Muslim thinkers to read the Quran for themselves so as to interpret jihad (humanitys struggle to arise from its fallen state) as not simply a personal struggle but a geopolitical one, the full resolution of which requires universal conversion to Islam.

That highly esteemed Muslim religious leaders may not support such an inflated sense of jihadism is irrelevant to the true jihadi, as religious leaders can always already appear compromised in some way. Thus, Gorka does not place any special burden on normal Muslims to counter jihadism. That would be like expecting the established Christian churches both Catholic and Protestant to have taken responsibility for all of the violence of the Christian dissenters, say, in the 17th century English Civil War and other modern freedom-fighting movements. Arguably one such movement was the American Revolution itself, which drew on St Augustines theology of human exceptionalism (i.e. our having been created in the image and likeness of God), without subscribing to any particular church.

Here the trope of Protestantism, which in recent years has been invoked by liberal Muslims such as Reza Aslan as the path to reforming Islam, should be seen in a more nuanced light. Just because the historical outcome of the Protestant Reformation has been, broadly speaking, a victory for secular democratic values, the forces that unleashed both jihadism and secular liberalism are largely the same. (Consider, say, the violent tone in which the original modern classic of freedom of expression, John Miltons Areopagitica, is written.) In both cases, people were encouraged to take the sacred book into their own hands as a source of personal empowerment, with the book read as posing to each reader an existential challenge.

Those who accept the challenge may join to form communities of various sorts, but these are never more than temporary holding patterns until the Kingdom of God is realised for all to see what on this reading of the Quran is the true caliphate. However, it is the sacred book not some particular human authority that ultimately licenses that activity. The resulting political sensibility may indeed be totalitarian yet without being especially authoritarian. (Here the writings of Eric Voegelin on political theology are useful.)

It is this permanently revolutionary sense of Protestantism to which Gorkas jihadism harkens, rather than the more settled secular versions exemplified by the US Constitution and other democracies formulated on similar grounds in the modern era. In these cases, the original revolutionary violence was specifically focused on more-or-less politically unified territories. Thus, the conflicts were broadly comprehensible within whats still called the Westphalian settlement, named for the 1648 European treaty that established the convention that nation-states are the primary units of political sovereignty. This fundamental assumption of modern international relations at both the diplomatic and military levels is now called into radical question by Gorkas totalising sense of jihadism.

Moreover, the plausibility of Gorkas world-view is facilitated by the de-territorialisation of ideology that information technology increasingly permits. In other words, Islamic jihadists can coordinate their activities across self-organising networks that are distributed across many countries, most if not all of which may otherwise abhor the ideology. Moreover, Islamic jihadism is a genuinely transhumanist ideology in that its self-identifying members think of themselves primarily as platforms for advancing the ideology, the full realisation of which they may or may not be personally involved in.

At one level, this sense of self-sacrifice is familiar from both capitalist and socialist narratives, which argue that the current generation lays the basis for subsequent generations to live better lives. In these explicitly secular narratives, which were pervasive during the Cold War, the expectation was that ones children or grandchildren might live in the utopia that the current generation was struggling to achieve. However, Islamic jihadism possesses at least three features that serve to undermine this Cold War intergenerational template of geopolitical struggle. I will go through them quickly.

I do not wish to comment here on the accuracy of Gorkas characterisation of so-called Islamic jihadists. But he certainly means to take them seriously so much so that he believes the United States and its allies should mirror much of their modus operandi. For example, Gorka thinks that security agencies should treat mosques and other religious institutions as secular public spaces, just as the jihadists themselves do, since the jihadists regard law-abiding Muslims as spiritually suspect unless proven otherwise. These spaces then become sites of ideological contestation, in which the religious authorities nominally in charge of them have little standing with either the jihadists or the US security agencies.

An epistemologically interesting consequence of Gorkas mirror strategy pertains to the role of information. It reflects the ease with which Steve Bannon and the Breitbart crowd surrounding Trump can live with the idea that we live in a post-truth world. Information is treated quite literally as a political football to be batted back and forth spun and re-spun. One might even speak of information as having become weaponised much more thoroughly than in past propaganda campaigns, which tended to emanate from a few authorised sources.

The key general insight, which underwrites the phenomenon of fake news, is that the distributed character of computer networks effectively blurs the difference between the production and consumption of information. But this goes beyond the mere fact that those who consume information can also produce it. Of greater significance is that it becomes harder for the consumer to tell how the information was produced. Indeed, as productive capacity is increased, accountability is decreased. Here Gorka is influenced by David Kilcullen, an Australian military strategist of counterinsurgency, a term he has made his own to characterise the mirroring posture that he would have the US and its allies adopt towards Islamic jihadists.

Kilcullen was a vocal critic of the Iraq war and especially the use of drones in warfare, as Barack Obama had begun to normalise in Afghanistan. In terms of the information war with the jihadists, all that did was provide visual ammunition for the enemy. Any image of a successful drone mission could be repackaged as having killed many innocents by some artful (or not, as the case may be) textual and visual recontextualisation. In that case, the sheer immediacy of the message combined with its multiple seemingly independent reproductions say, on social media would override concerns about the images authenticity, which may have been untraceable in any case. (Jacques Derrida must be either turning over in his grave or laughing to the bank.)

What is perhaps most striking about Gorkas world-view is his Platonic sensibility about the nature of war it is all about winning hearts and minds, not lands and lives. His own writings make it clear that s/he who strives the hardest the longest ultimately wins, regardless of the body count. While this ethic will be immediately recognisable to the so-called Islamic jihadists, it is not so clear how it will play with Trump supporters who identify their interests including what they mean by security with something having a much more restricted world-historic scope. In other words: How exactly can a potentially endless ideological struggle be fought when one of the parties the United States seems under President Trump to be keener than ever to protect its territorial integrity and the material security of its citizens?

Please read our comments policy before commenting.

Note: This article gives the views of theauthor, and not the position of EUROPP European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.

_________________________________

About the author

Steve Fuller University of WarwickSteve Fullerholds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick.

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Mastering Trump's mastermind: Sebastian Gorka and the struggle between Islam and the West - EUROPP - European Politics and Policy (blog)

Feb 13, 2017 11:33 AM

Girls age 11 to 14 at Springs School will begin sessions with i-Tri, a program that fosters self-respect, personal empowerment, self-confidence, positive body image and healthy lifestyle choices for girls, this month; in March they begin training for their first triathlon. Through a curriculum of physical fitness, family outreach, nutrition classes and self-esteem workshops, affirming respect, responsibility, teamwork and dedication, as well as the sport of triathlon, i-Tri girls develop healthy habits and healthy attitudes which last a lifetime. At an age at which they are often confronted with difficult life choices, i-Tri girls are taught to believe in themselves and their peers.

The Functional Academics class made handmade Valentines day chocolates to sell as candy grams to the seventh- and eighth-graders. The chocolates cost $1 a bag with profits supporting Special Olympics. The orders were taken in the students lunchrooms ahead of time and delivered anonymously on Valentines Day.

Fourth-graders may participate in band and/or chorus in the early morning.

Students in kindergarten through sixth grade may sign up for the Camp Invention summer program at the school. Details and registration information is on the school website.

The Famous Springs Mystery Art Sale (SMARTS) is back again this spring! Students, teachers, and community members voted for a purple logo this year. Students are hard at work creating their 5 x 7 pieces of art which will be featured at Ashawagh Hall for sale side by side with the art of several local artists. Artists are encouraged to contact art teachers Colleen McGowan and Alex DeHavenon to contribute.

P.S. I Love You Day was celebrated on February 14, after being snowed out on last week. Teachers, students, and staff wore purple on Tuesday to be mindful of the positive impact kindness can have on others. Fourth grade teachers Mrs. Knight and Mrs. Reiner hope to make this a new annual celebration at the school where everyone makes a point to tell others that they are loved and accepted. Purple post-it notes covered the school with sentiments such as you rock or youre special. Student JanPol Munzon said, All I want is for everyone to have a good heart and all students have nice emotions and no one violates anyone else. I want this school to just have peace and justice.

Budget work sessions have begun for the 2017-18 school year. The next will be Wednesday. March 1. All community members are welcome.

The PTA hosted a very successful Skate Night at Buckskill for grades five through eight. This was made possible by the Turkey Trot, the pasta lunch, and other fundraising throughout the year. The PTA makes many special events and field trips possible. Please contact Mark Lappin for information on future events.

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Springs School News, February 16 - Springs - 27east - 27east.com

Bells University of Technology and New Horizons, the worlds largest international certification-oriented ICT and e-business training organisation, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to boost the employability and entrepreneurial chances of its graduates by formalising a Strategic Training Partnership.

At the MoU signing event at the university campus last week, the universitys Vice Chancellor, Professor Jeremiah Ojediran, expressed his excitement at the great opportunities which the programme will primarily accord the students irrespective of their academic disciplines and the relevant university staff members who will also enjoy periodic staff training.

Speaking, the Vice Chancellor reiterated that the seamless mandatory schedule will guarantee that every student of the university will undergo specialised international certification- based Professional IT and E Business Skills training and acquire a minimum of four International Professional Licences in lucrative technologies.

He reasoned that given the global economic challenges and the shrinking employment opportunities worldwide and in Nigeria especially, Bells University graduates would be able to use the extra internationally validated professional skills-set as the Icing Crown on their BSc and BA Academic Degree Cakes to become the toast of the employers for lucrative jobs as well as get opportunity to become self-employed as specialists and consultants in these globally hot skills and certification areas.

According to the VC, time is now ripe for Bells University to lead others to produce the next generation of the likes of Bill Gates of Microsoft, Mack Zuckerberg of Facebook and so on that will enable Nigerian graduates leverage the huge potentials in ICT to reposition Nigerian economy from an oil dependent nation to an ICT giant nations like, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and India that transformed their poor economies through ICT.

In the same vein, Ojediran appreciated the other two great benefits which the strategic partnership will bestow on the staff members in terms of the free ICT and E Business trainings that will boost their official and personal productivity and the second benefit of an annual financial awards/ prizes that will be won by three best published academic lecturers as the Companys CSR for promotion of healthy academic rivalry and excellence.

Speaking, the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of New Horizons, Nigerian branch, Mr Tim Akano, commended the visionary management of the university for the partnership initiative. He restated the necessity for such strategic synergies between the academics and the Industry in this information Age, such that will aid the universities to regain and fulfil their traditional role of serving as the manufacturing/incubating house for production of future fully-baked graduates empowered with both academic excellence and ICT-driven professional competences for both the employment and self- employment industry.

Akano equally recapped that the programme will further serve to augment the Webometric ranking of the university, since the training infrastructure to be supplied by New Horizons including, branded 200 Computers, Smart interactive

Boards, networking, original high-end software, and top International Professional skills and Certifications like: Androids, Robotics, CISA, Oracle, Java Programming, Multimedia, Information Security, etcetera constitute variables that will boost the IT-driven stance of Bells University as part of the global ranking metrics.

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Bells University, New Horizons sign MoU On ICT empowerment for students - NIGERIAN TRIBUNE (press release) (blog)

Children take on the role of firefighters at a Salamander session

A NEW eight-week programme which will give children a glimpse of what its like to be a firefighter will begin in April.

Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service recently received funding of 5,000 from Westbury Area Board to deliver the Westbury Salamander programme, which will be open to children aged between 13-19 selected by the fire service.

Rob Guy, youth intervention manager for Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service, said: The Salamander Project is a tailored personal development programme designed to promote empowerment in a positive environment to help build young peoples confidence and skills.

Working in partnership with Youth in Focus, street-based youth workers will work with local partners to target young people aged 13-19 in need of positive activities to build confidence, develop new skills or those who are in danger of engaging in risk taking behaviour.

We would like to thank Wiltshire Council, Westbury Area Board and the Local Youth Network Management group for their support in enabling us to provide positive activities for young people in the area.

At the sessions, held at Westbury Fire Station, children will undertake tasks including using fire hoses and investigating mock car crashes, learning why dangerous driving is a bad idea.

Salamander programmes have in the past been run as intensive five-day courses in other towns but this is the first time it will be delivered at weekly sessions.

At the end of the programme, participants will have a chance to demonstrate what they have learned to their family members at a passing out parade.

Contact Mr Guy on 07739 899293 if you need more information.

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Fire service receives funding to deliver 'personal development ... - Wiltshire Times

CONCORD , CA (February 13, 2017) Saving for higher education and managing finances is daunting for most families. Northwest credit unions are offering two powerful solutions: matched savings and a comprehensive digital financial education toolkit.

Credit unions offering the Northwest Matched Education Savings Account (MESA) Program provide financial assistance to individuals with lower incomes by helping them save for post-secondary education at Idaho, Oregon, or Washington schools. The program, facilitated by the Northwest Credit Union Foundation (NWCUF) and Montanas Credit Unions for Community Development (MCUCD), offers a 3:1 savings match. For every dollar a participant saves, he or she will be eligible to receive another three dollars, with a maximum match of up to $1,500. One of the requirements for participation is completion of a personal finance/money management course.

The NWCUF selected BALANCEs BalanceTrack eLearning modules to provide training to MESA account holders.

We looked for a fun, easy, helpful resource for our MESA students and we found that in our partnership with BALANCE, said Denise Gabel, NWCUF Executive Director.

Participants will utilize the BalanceTrack series of eLearning modules focusing on eight core financial topics: money management, checking account management, high-cost financial services, the psychology of spending, purchasing an automobile, credit matters, understanding credit reports, and repaying student debt. Each module includes coursework, worksheets, podcasts, and quizzes. At the end of each module, participants are tested on the concepts they learned.

The 184 credit unions in the Northwest are focused on empowering families to save. Improving financial capability is exactly what not-for-profit, member-owned credit unions are all about, said Gabel.

BALANCE is the leader in innovative financial empowerment programs, financial education services, and housing and credit counseling. BALANCE is a non-profit and is a member of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC). The company is accredited by the Council on Accreditation of Services for Families and Children, Inc. and is certified by HUD to provide comprehensive housing counseling services. BALANCEs certified counselors have been helping individuals and families achieve their financial goals since 1969. For more information, visit http://www.balancepro.org.

The Northwest MESA Program is a collaborative project between the Northwest Credit Union Association, Northwest Credit Union Foundation, Montana Credit Unions for Community Development, and US Department of Health and Human Services through the Assets for Independence program. Additional program partners include Idaho, Oregon, and Washington credit unions.

The Northwest Credit Union Foundation (NWCUF) is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to identifying and nurturing partnerships that bring together Northwest credit unions, community organizations and nonprofits to improve and grow the regional economy. NWCUF provides credit unions and community partners with support that promotes asset-building, economic empowerment, and cooperative development. Learn more at http://www.nwcuf.org.

James Flores Vice President Marketing & Education (714) 447-1110

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Northwest Credit Union Foundation partners with BALANCE to provide personal finance training to MESA participants - CUinsight.com (press release)

I write to you this week just moments after being informed that one of my greatest mentors is preparing for death.

David Patient became my mentor in 2013. I met him in Mpumalanga, South Africa. He spoke to U.S. Peace Corps volunteers. His first words to us were, AIDS has been my greatest teacher.

I write to you this week just moments after being informed that one of my greatest mentors is preparing for death.

David Patient became my mentor in 2013. I met him in Mpumalanga, South Africa. He spoke to U.S. Peace Corps volunteers. His first words to us were, AIDS has been my greatest teacher.

David was one of the first people in the world to be diagnosed as HIV positive in 1983. The medical world knew little about the illness at the time.

As you read this, many are asking, Was David a homosexual man? Did he get the disease from drug use?

While I will not answer these questions, I will share about who and what he was.

David was a reflection of the troubled youth growing up in our communities.

He grew up feeling unloved. He dealt with the angry outrages of an alcoholic parent. By his teenage years, he believed he was worthless. He lived in emotional hell and wondered why he was alive at all.

David attempted suicide on numerous occasions. He numbed his pain with substances. Then he was diagnosed with HIV and told he would die soon. He watched many of his friends die.

Something shifted within him. One day he climbed to the top of a mountain with the goal of killing himself. Once alone atop the peak, he had an epiphany. He realized that his pain could become his power and purpose in life.

Over the next 30-plus years, David dedicated himself to health-care research, personal empowerment, and community development.

He became a consultant to the United Nations, and co-led a project that helped women from the Massai tribe of Kenya become economically active for the first time in history.

He donated years of his life to teaching people how to live longer and healthier lives in defiance of sickness.

He taught orphans how to grow their own food so they wouldnt starve.

He taught communities how to tackle their problems as a team.

He authored several books to teach others about how worthy they are and about our power to overcome lifes obstacles.

Thousands of people from all over the world are alive, healthy, and contributing to the greater good of humanity because of Davids touch in the world.

Today, his body is shutting down but his imprint in the world is vast and deep. Multiple nations have been uplifted by his legacy.

I cant tell you what happened for David that day atop the mountain. But I believe something divine sparked within him and helped him to feel the truth.

The truth is every single individual has a purpose in life.

Every individual is worthy of love.

We live in a world that tells us we are not good enough because we do not have this, or because we do not look like that.

We live in a world that justifies hatred over differences.

There is no justification for hatred.

Hatred is not our purpose.

Our purpose has something to do with love.

David made a difference in the world.

So do you whether you choose to judge and hate, or accept and love.

When your body is shutting down, and death is nearing, what kind of memories do you want rolling through your tired mind?

What kind of legacy do you wish to leave behind?

In what ways can we love ourselves and others more?

Do you criticize yourself/others?

Do you harm yourself with an unhealthy diet or destructive substances?

Have you thoughts about suicide?

Do you know others dealing with these issues?

Love is your purpose.

How can you love yourself and others more?

David Patient asked these simple questions. He let his heart guide him.

Is your heart guiding you?

The end of your book of life is being written by each thought you have, every word you speak, and every deed you do.

Was your last thought loving?

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The Ripple - Olney Daily Mail