Sam Daley-Harris

Last updated
Sam Daley-Harris
OccupationWriter and activist
Known forFounding Results
Notable work
Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government

Sam Daley-Harris is an American activist and author. He is the founder of Results, and has been a hunger eradication advocate and democracy activist since the mid-1970s. Daley-Harris is also the author of Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government.

Contents

Early career

Early in his life, Sam Daley-Harris was a music teacher, and was a percussionist for the Miami Philharmonic. [1]

Activism

During the 1970s Daley-Harris became involved in the movement to eradicate global hunger. During this process he spoke with about seven thousand high-school students, at which time he discovered that only 3% of the youth knew the name of their congressperson. In response, he founded an organization called Results (stylized: RESULTS), [2] which is an acronym for "Responsibility for Ending Starvation Using Legislation, Trimtabbing, and Support". [3] After working with other anti-hunger organizations like Bread for the World, [4] he founded the organization in 1980, which recruited and trained volunteers to lobby the government on food security and hunger issues. Tactics have included sit-down meetings with politicians, generating supportive media, and letter writing campaigns. [5]

The organization has also [6] helped advocate for global vaccination campaigns with UNICEF, and worked in promoting micro-lending. Muhammad Yunus said of Results' work in micro-lending that, “No other organization has been as critical a partner in seeing to it that micro-credit is used as a tool to eradicate poverty and empower women.” [7] Daley-Harris has also served as the director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, [8] [9] where he advocated for the role of microcredit in combating poverty. [10] The Microcredit Summit Campaign tracked the “performance” of microfinance organizations. [11]

He later founded the organization Center for Citizen Empowerment and Transformation, which provides consultations to organizations on the subject of “deep advocacy”, a method of working with politicians and the media to fuel advocacy efforts for social issues. [2] The organization later changed its name to Civic Courage. [12] He has also worked with Citizens' Climate Lobby. [13] [2] [14]

Writing

Sam Daley-Harris is the author of the book Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government, which at the end of the book outlines thirteen “principles of action”, and uses case-studies of successful advocacy to show evidence of their efficacy. [7] Many of the case-studies come from Daley-Harris’ work as the head of Results. [15] The original version was published in 1993, and a twentieth anniversary edition was published in 2013 with a foreword by Muhammad Yunus. [16] He is also the co-editor of the book New Pathways Out of Poverty. [17]

Related Research Articles

Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to impoverished borrowers who typically lack collateral, steady employment, or a verifiable credit history. It is designed to support entrepreneurship and alleviate poverty. Many recipients are illiterate, and therefore unable to complete paperwork required to get conventional loans. As of 2009 an estimated 74 million people held microloans that totaled US$38 billion. Grameen Bank reports that repayment success rates are between 95 and 98 percent.

Microfinance

Microfinance is a category of financial services targeting individuals and small businesses who lack access to conventional banking and related services. Microfinance includes microcredit, the provision of small loans to poor clients; savings and checking accounts; microinsurance; and payment systems, among other services. Microfinance services are designed to reach excluded customers, usually poorer population segments, possibly socially marginalized, or geographically more isolated, and to help them become self-sufficient.

Grameen Bank is a microfinance organisation and community development bank founded in Bangladesh. It makes small loans to the impoverished without requiring collateral.

Muhammad Yunus Bangladeshi banker, economist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, banker, economist and civil society leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. These loans are given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. Yunus and the Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts through microcredit to create economic and social development from below". The Norwegian Nobel Committee said that "lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty" and that "across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development". Yunus has received several other national and international honours. He received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010.

Poverty reduction Measures to reduce poverty permanently

Poverty reduction, poverty relief, or poverty alleviation, is a set of measures, both economic and humanitarian, that are intended to permanently lift people out of poverty.

Grameen Foundation, founded as Grameen Foundation USA, also known as "GFUSA", is a global 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Washington, DC, that works to replicate the Grameen Bank microfinance model around the world through a global network of partner microfinance institutions. Its CEO is Steve Hollingworth. Grameen Foundation's mission is, "To enable the poor, especially the poorest, to create a world without poverty." According to the OECD, Grameen Foundation’s financing for 2019 development increased by 33% to US$45.5 million.

Vikram Akula

Vikram Akula is an American banker and the founder of SKS Microfinance, a micro finance company and former chairperson of Bharat Financial Inclusion Ltd. SKS was an organization that offered microloans and insurance to poor women in India. He stepped down as SKS Chairperson in November 2011 and became Chairperson Emeritus.

Freedom from Hunger

Freedom from Hunger is an international development organization working in nineteen different countries. Freedom from Hunger is a nonprofit, nongovernmental, nonsectarian organization classified by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) charity.

Kiva (organization) Micro-loan platform

Kiva is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, that allows people to lend money via the Internet to low-income entrepreneurs and students in 77 countries. Kiva's mission is "to expand financial access to help underserved communities thrive."

<i>Banker to the Poor</i>

Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty is an autobiography of 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus. The book describes Yunus' early life, moving into his college years, and into his years as a professor at Chittagong University. While a professor at Chittagong University, Yunus began to take notice of the extreme poverty of the villagers around him. In 1976, Yunus incorporated the help of Maimuna Begum to collect data of people in Jobra who were living in poverty. Most of these impoverished people would take a loan from moneylenders to buy some raw material, using that raw material to create some product, and then selling back the good to the moneylender to repay the loan, earning a very meager profit. One woman interviewed made no more than two cents per day creating bamboo stools using this system. The list Begum brought back to Yunus named 42 women who were living on credit of 856 taka.

The Comilla Model was a rural development programme launched in 1959 by the Pakistan Academy for Rural Development. The Academy, which is located on the outskirts of Comilla town, was founded by Akhter Hameed Khan, the cooperative pioneer who was responsible for developing and launching the programme.

Solidarity lending

Solidarity lending is a lending practice where small groups borrow collectively and group members encourage one another to repay. It is an important building block of microfinance.

Grameen family of organizations

The Grameen family of organizations has grown beyond Grameen Bank into a multi-faceted group of profitable and non-profit ventures, established by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winning founder of Grameen Bank. Most of these organizations have central offices at the Grameen Bank Complex in Mirpur, Dhaka, Bangladesh. The Grameen Bank started to diversify in the late 1980s when it started attending to unutilized or underutilized fishing ponds, as well as irrigation pumps like deep tubewells. In 1989, these diversified interests started growing into separate organizations, as the fisheries project became Grameen Fisheries Foundation and the irrigation project became Grameen Krishi Foundation.

Microcredit Summit Campaign

The Microcredit Summit Campaign, an American non-profit organization, started as an effort to bring together microcredit practitioners, advocates, educational institutions, donor agencies, international financial institutions, non-governmental organizations and others involved with microcredit around the goal of alleviating world poverty through microfinance.

Gregory F. Casagrande is an American businessman and the founder of South Pacific Business Development Microfinance Network, the leading microfinance institution in the Pacific Islands region. He is also the founder of MicroDreams, a microfinance acceleration fund working with emerging microfinance institutions in Latin America, Africa and the Pacific and Transformative Ventures LLC, a Microfinance advisory company.

Warner P. Woodworth is a global social entrepreneur and professor emeritus in the Department of Management in the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University (BYU). He is a leading advocate of development of microcredit and has been involved in researching as well as developing such programs.

The impact of microcredit is a subject of much controversy. Proponents state that it reduces poverty through higher employment and higher incomes. This is expected to lead to improved nutrition and improved education of the borrowers' children. Some argue that microcredit empowers women. In the US and Canada, it is argued that microcredit helps recipients to graduate from welfare programs. Critics say that microcredit has not increased incomes, but has driven poor households into a debt trap, in some cases even leading to suicide. They add that the money from loans is often used for durable consumer goods or consumption instead of being used for productive investments, that it fails to empower women, and that it has not improved health or education.

RESULTS is a US non-partisan citizens' advocacy organization founded in 1980.

Kashf Foundation

Kashf Foundation is a non-profit organization, founded by Roshaneh Zafar in 1996. Kashf is regarded as the first microfinance institution (MFI) of Pakistan that uses village banking methodology in microcredit to alleviate poverty by providing affordable financial and non-financial services to low income households - particularly for women, to build their capacity and enhance their economic role. With headquarters in Lahore, Punjab, Kashf has regional offices in five major cities and over 200 branches across the Pakistan.

Marshall L. Saunders was an American activist and founder of the Citizens' Climate Lobby. He raised funds and served on the board of a microfinance organization, spoke to thousands about climate change, and lobbied for United States Congress to adopt policies to reduce poverty.

References

  1. ↑ Bornstein, David. "Lobbying for the Greater Good".
  2. 1 2 3 Bornstein, David (4 July 2017). "Opinion - Putting Citizenship Back in Congress" – via NYTimes.com.
  3. ↑ Counts, Alex (31 March 2008). Small Loans, Big Dreams: How Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus and Microfinance are Changing the World. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN   9780470285275 – via Google Books.
  4. ↑ Simon, Arthur (16 March 2018). The Rising of Bread for the World: An Outcry of Citizens Against Hunger. Paulist Press. ISBN   9780809146000 – via Google Books.
  5. ↑ Holzberg, Janene. "Laurel grassroots advocates take on big change". The Baltimore Sun.
  6. ↑ Rosenberg, Tina (16 March 2018). "Opinion - From Protests Past, Lessons in What Works" – via NYTimes.com.
  7. 1 2 Boyte, Harry (15 October 2013). "Reclaiming Our Democracy -- Lessons From the Trenches of Citizen Advocacy".
  8. ↑ "Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Micro-Loan Pioneers". news.nationalgeographic.com.
  9. ↑ Miller, Claire Cain. "Easy Money".
  10. ↑ Arena, Christine (8 February 2011). Cause for Success: 10 Companies That Put Profit Second and Came in First. New World Library. ISBN   9781577319214 – via Google Books.
  11. ↑ Prasad, Anshuman; Prasad, Pushkala; Mills, Albert J.; Mills, Jean Helms (14 August 2015). The Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies. Routledge. ISBN   9781134511235 – via Google Books.
  12. ↑ Rosenberg, Tina (16 March 2018). "Opinion - A Year of Pushback to Save Social Innovation" – via NYTimes.com.
  13. ↑ Bornstein, David (19 May 2017). "Opinion - Cracking Washington's Gridlock to Save the Planet" – via NYTimes.com.
  14. ↑ Kristof, Nicholas (13 April 2017). "Opinion - How to Stand Up to Trump and Win" – via NYTimes.com.
  15. ↑ Dauncey, Guy (1 October 2009). The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming. New Society Publishers. ISBN   9781550924374 – via Google Books.
  16. ↑ "uprisingradio.org » Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government". uprisingradio.org.
  17. ↑ Daley-Harris, Sam; Awimbo, Anna (16 March 2018). New Pathways Out of Poverty. Kumarian Press. ISBN   9781565494381 – via Google Books.
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