Here, from Bill Clinton, is a call to action.
Giving is an inspiring look at how each of us can
change the world. First, it reveals the extraordinary and
innovative efforts now being made by companies and
organizations—and by individuals—to solve problems and save
lives both “down the street and around the world.” Then it
urges us to seek out what each of us, “regardless of income,
available time, age, and skills,” can do to help, to give
people a chance to live out their dreams.
Bill
Clinton shares his own experiences and those of other
givers, representing a global flood tide of nongovernmental,
nonprofit activity. These remarkable stories demonstrate
that gifts of time, skills, things, and ideas are as
important and effective as contributions of money. From Bill
and Melinda Gates to a six-year-old California girl named
McKenzie Steiner, who organized and supervised drives to
clean up the beach in her community, Clinton introduces us
to both well-known and unknown heroes of giving. Among
them:
Dr. Paul Farmer, who grew up living in the
family bus in a trailer park, vowed to devote his life to
giving high-quality medical care to the poor and has built
innovative public health-care clinics first in Haiti and
then in Rwanda; a New York couple, in Africa for a
wedding, who visited several schools in Zimbabwe and were
appalled by the absence of textbooks and school supplies.
They founded their own organization to gather and ship
materials to thirty-five schools. After three years, the
percentage of seventh-graders who pass reading tests
increased from 5 percent to 60 percent;' Oseola McCarty,
who after seventy-five years of eking out a living by
washing and ironing, gave $150,000 to the University of
Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for
African-American students; Andre Agassi, who has created
a college preparatory academy in the Las Vegas neighborhood
with the city’s highest percentage of at-risk kids. “Tennis
was a stepping-stone for me,” says Agassi. “Changing a
child’s life is what I always wanted to do”; Heifer
International, which gave twelve goats to a Ugandan village.
Within a year, Beatrice Biira’s mother had earned enough
money selling goat’s milk to pay Beatrice’s school fees and
eventually to send all her children to school—and, as
required, to pass on a baby goat to another family, thus
multiplying the impact of the gift.
Clinton writes
about men and women who traded in their corporate careers,
and the fulfillment they now experience through giving. He
writes about energy-efficient practices, about progressive
companies going green, about promoting fair wages and decent
working conditions around the world. He shows us how one of
the most important ways of giving can be an effort to
change, improve, or protect a government policy. He outlines
what we as individuals can do, the steps we can take, how
much we should consider giving, and why our giving is so
important.
Bill Clinton’s own actions in his
post-presidential years have had an enormous impact on the
lives of millions. Through his foundation and his work in
the aftermath of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, he
has become an international spokesperson and model for the
power of giving.
“We all have the capacity to do
great things,” President Clinton says. “My hope is that the
people and stories in this book will lift spirits, touch
hearts, and demonstrate that citizen activism and service
can be a powerful agent of change in the world.”
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