High School Students will live on $2 a day to draw attention to World Poverty

Sept. 15, 2010 - PRLog -- While their peers may be spending $2 in a matter of minutes on gas money or at the nearest vending machine, a group of Hillsdale High students is going to attempt to spend no more than $2 a day for 48 hours. The 15 students, members of a club known as The Hillsdale Effect, are carrying out this challenge to raise awareness of the 2.2 billion people living on $2 or less a day around the globe and of the ability of microloans to address the problem of poverty.

On September 15th, the students will set up an encampment in the center of the school and cook their meals--primarily rice and beans for lunch and dinner and an egg with one piece of bread for breakfast--on a propane stove.  They will study by candlelight and bathe using a bucket of water gathered from the nearest drinking fountain. Eggs will be purchased each night at a local market because they will not have access to refrigeration. Students created a detailed budget to account for each cost and quickly realized how many usual luxuries they would have to sacrifice: no cosmetics, no showers, no travel by car, no computer access beyond school hours and no cell phones.

“Through planning this event we have only just begun to learn what it must be like to live with so little,” states Emily Wolfsohn, a student member of the club. “We are only doing this for 48 hours, but billions of people must live in far worse circumstances for their entire lives.”

“Their first instinct was often to look for loopholes or to look for ways they could benefit from the wealth of resources that still surrounds them,” notes the clubs advisor, English teacher Greg Lance. “Although such resourcefulness is certainly a quality people living in poverty develop, the students learned that loopholes and the relative wealth of their surrounding community are just not available to the billions of people still living in poverty around the world.”

The Hillsdale Effect receives support and advice from members of the San Mateo Rotary Club while also working together with Namaste-Direct, a non-profit based in San Francisco and Guatemala, to fund microloans for women in Guatemala. The club seeks to raise awareness of the UN Millennium Development Goals, which call for halving extreme poverty by 2015. The event, and others staged around the world, are timed to coincide with the meeting of the United Nation’s General Assembly next week.

Since the club’s inception, Hillsdale students have raised funds to help 19 women in Guatemala start businesses and receive vocational training. This past summer, 10 students from the club and Lance traveled to Guatemala with Namaste-Direct’s President, Kristin Houk, to deliver the loans in person and to visit the women from the first loan cycle, all of whom have now fully repaid their loans. Students learned first-hand about poverty, economic development, microloans and Guatemalan culture.

The Two Dollars a Day experience sets the stage for a fall fundraising drive that will include a “Penny War” competition between classes and culminate in a school-wide assembly with all the students standing up on the school soccer field on the Friday before the International Day for the Eradication of Extreme Poverty.

Last year, the student body raised over $6000 in coins to provide impoverished women in Guatemala with loans and participated in a world-wide Stand-Up Against Poverty Event, spelling out the school’s initials with their bodies on the soccer field. “This year, we hope to at least duplicate that success and we have some new twists planned for the big assembly on October 15th,” states Lance.

On October 16th, Lance’s English classes, which are currently reading the novel, The Kite Runner, will put on a Kite Festival on the same soccer field and raise funds for children in Afghanistan.

Hundreds of students are actively involved in one or both events and Lance sees a surging interest within the student body in global issues and service. “Our students are aware of how connected the world is, that the lives of people in Afghanistan and Guatemala do have an impact on our lives here. Young people want to have a positive impact on the world they will inherit and these projects are giving them the ability to do so,” Lance states.

The press is invited to visit the students at their encampment Thursday, September 16 from 11:30-12:30 and that evening, from 6:00pm to 7:00 pm.

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Hillsdale High School is a California Distinguished School and a Stanford University education partner. With the Small Learning Community (SLC) grants to further its work, Hillsdale has become a national model for comprehensive high school reform.