Welcome to ACT's Blog

Ambition to Change Tomorrow is a non-profit organization, founded by two girls dreaming to end world hunger, but do more than only daydreaming. We take action! Our goal is to do as much as we can to make a dream of millions come true. This may seem like an unrealistic and way too ambitious mission for two young girls without any backgrounds or experiences. However, we believe with all our hearts that, we have the power to do anything we want, simply because we care! We wish to change the world by doing more than saying "That's terrible" and forget about the sufferings of so many others in seconds and go back to our daily lives which we too often take for granted. We want to make a difference, even if we have to start with little things, but even little and seemingly insignificant changes can affect people in ways hard to imagine, we are certain that one day, many more are going to want to react and do more for people who are most in need.




Ella & Manda

4-10-2008

Ambition to Change Tomorrow

(ACT)

ACT Gulf Coast Recovery Car wash

Saturday, 10 July 2010

9:00 am - 3:00 pm

2180 Bullis Rd, Sunoco Aplus

Join us for our car wash in support of the Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research. Their experts are leading the wildlife rescue efforts following the Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico. Tri-State's oil spill response team has been on the Gulf Coast since the last week in April and is working with their West Coast colleagues, International Bird Rescue Research Center, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to manage the rehabilitation of oiled wildlife.

Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research has been responding to wildlife involved in oil spills since 1976. Tri-State has a trained, dedicated staff on call 24-hours-a-day to respond to wildlife contaminated by oil spills anywhere in the world. Tri-State is one of only two organizations in the country that can professionally manage a response to a major spill. Rehabilitation of oiled wildlife is a complex, crisis-oriented endeavor.

visit http://www.tristatebird.org/ for more information

Ambition to Change Tomorrow is a non-profit organization, founded by two girls dreaming to solve pressing and serious problems worldwide, but do more than only daydreaming. We take action! Instead of waiting for others to solve all our complicated problems, we aim to spread empathy throughout our community by setting an example.

email us at actorganization@aol

Laura and Amanda

ACT is sponsoring a carwash to support the efforts of Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research.

Their experts are leading the wildlife rescue efforts following the Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico. Tri-State's oil spill response team has been on the Gulf Coast since the last week in April and is working with their West Coast colleagues, International Bird Rescue Research Center, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to manage the rehabilitation of oiled wildlife. These response leaders are receiving additional support from other rehabilitators and wildlife and environmental organizations.

http://www.tristatebird.org/

Date:

Saturday, 10 July 2010

Time:

09:00 - 15:00

Location:

Sunoco Aplus

Street:

2180 Bullis Rd

let me know if you have any questions regarding the car wash, the meeting, community service hours or anything else. I'll be more than happy to answer them.

Car Wash

Money Raised: $289

It doesn't take much to make a difference.

Good News

All fund raisers ACT hold from now on will count as community services hours toward your graduation requirement!

Ella

News

As many of you may already know, ACT's current project is fund raising for the Zambian Children's Fund, and several people have asked me questions about other ACT projects. ACT is a group that wishes to fund raise for many charities and causes, however, because we do not yet have enough members and staff, we have decided to work on one project at the time. And right now, our main focus is to fund raise for the Zambian Children's Fund. Thank you.

Ella

Why We Want To Help

African children eat because of Tucsonan

Then Kathe Padilla, others help school them

ANNE T. DENOGEAN
Tucson Citizen

Kathe Padilla's labor of love was inspired by a July 4, 1999, newspaper article about homeless orphans living in the streets of Lusaka, Zambia.

The scale of the country's desperation hit the Tucsonan when she read the caption accompanying a picture of children eating from bowls on their laps. It said the Fountain of Hope charity fed 100 children every day. But she knew from reading the article that the organization had 2,000 children registered.

"As a mother, I was so horrified by the thought of, 'How do you decide which 100 children out of the 2,000 you feed?' And if you tried to be fair and feed everybody once before anybody else got fed a second time, it would take a month. And no child could survive on eating once a month.

"That's when I said, 'I could feed 100 or 200 children in Zambia. I know I could make this happen,'" said Padilla, a social activist who had long worked with the food bank and other Tucson agencies that fight hunger and homelessness.

In the eight years since, Padilla, 55, created the Zambian Children's Fund and built an orphanage and school campus outside Lusaka that serves more than 100 children. She hopes to slowly build it up to shelter 500 children.

"I realized that I couldn't stop at just feeding children. I couldn't just put them back out on the street once I had fed them. I decided to try to raise them as if they were my own and do everything I could for them," she said.

Zambia, a nation of 11.7 million people in southern Africa, is one of the world's poorest countries. It has more than 1.2 million orphaned children, including about 710,000 who have lost their parents to AIDS. An estimated 17 percent of the adult population is infected with HIV.

In the face of the AIDS crisis, tuberculosis, malaria, starvation and poverty that limits access to the most basic health care, the average Zambian can expect to live no longer than 38 years.

That's the world Padilla entered when she flew to Zambia on her own in the fall of 1999 and started knocking on doors to recruit people to serve as the board of directors of what would become The Chishawasha Children's Home of Zambia.

Padilla recounts the history of the sister organizations on www.zambianchildrensfund.org.

By early 2001, the Tucson and Zambian organizations were able to open a home-based support program that helped orphaned children stay in school by paying their fees and providing them with shoes, uniforms and school supplies. Despite high unemployment rates, families have to pay to send children to public schools in Zambia, Padilla said. The children in the program were living with relatives or without an adult in the homes the parents had left them.

Padilla said it's not uncommon to come across grandmothers caring for 20 or more orphaned grandchildren.

"Basically, they are watching them starve because they have no pension or Social Security," she said.

By May 2001, the sister organizations were able to rent a three-bedroom house in a Lusaka neighborhood, hire a house mother and move in the first 16 children.

"The children arrived dressed in rags, malnourished and with little or no education. The two consistent things they brought with them were parasites and disease. Most of the children had intestinal worms or worse," Padilla wrote. "The most rewarding part of living with the children was watching them turn from listless children who neither wanted nor seemed to be able to do anything into bright, happy, healthy children in just a few months.

Once a month, (I) would line them up to check their height and weight. Children were growing one or two inches a month and gaining as much as 20 pounds. Because they arrived from all over the country, each of them immediately started learning all of the five different languages spoken in the house."

In September 2001, a teacher was hired, and classes for the young residents began in grass huts behind the house. Children from the surrounding areas as well started attending the school.

Thanks to a $50,000 gift from Tucson's New Spirit Lutheran Church, the orphanage bought 15 acres eight miles north of Lusaka in 2004 and started building the first of two five-bedroom houses. The children moved from Lusaka to the new campus in 2005.

The Colin B. Glassco Charitable Foundation for Children of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, contacted Padilla after a small article appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine, asking whether it could help. The foundation provided a well and complete water system and has since become a major contributor, helping to pay for the construction of four residences and the first wing of what will be a three-wing school.

Colin Glassco "fell in love with the whole project and what we were doing," Padilla said.

A retired Tucson couple, Dr. Robert Garrett, 65, and Mary Hotvedt, 62, have volunteered with the Zambian Children's Fund to establish a medical clinic and a skills center at the orphanage complex. They recently returned from Zambia and have committed to spend three months there each year for five years.

Hotvedt, a certified marriage and family therapist, said it was a chance "to do work that felt like it was meaningful in a different way."

"I feel very good about it. I feel it's a drop in the bucket in terms of the issues that AIDS, colonialism, poverty and bad government have left in their wake."

Early in this endeavor, Tucsonans provided about 99 percent of the financial support, said Padilla, who jokes that she's "a professional beggar." Though the list of contributors has expanded and the fund now has working groups in Nashville, Tenn., Toronto and Ithaca, N.Y., Tucsonans still account for nearly half of all donations, she said.

Every two years, the fund sends from Tucson to Zambia a 40-foot shipping container packed with donated goods, including shoes, clothes, computers, sewing machines and school supplies.

"Bookmans gives us tens of thousands of books," Padilla said. "TUSD (Tucson Unified School District) gives old desks, chairs, tables, blackboards, etc. All of our classrooms are from TUSD. Our library is from Bookmans and individual donations. People give us packages of underwear, new shoes. . . . We love to get soccer shoes."

The First Congregational United Church of Christ provides free office and storage spaces for the Zambian Children's Fund.

The fund has two paid American employees - Padilla and a part-time assistant. That allows it to spend the bulk of its $300,000 operational budget this calendar year to feed, clothe and care for the children and pay Zambian teachers and house mothers.

Padilla can save only a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million Zambian orphans. But she doesn't let the overwhelming need discourage her.

"The children I take in I know would not survive without what we are doing. We are handing them a real life," she said.

Anne T. Denogean can be reached at 573-4582 and adenogean@tucsoncitizen.com. Address letters to P.O. Box 26767, Tucson, AZ 85726-6767. Her column runs Tuesdays and Fridays.

Ella