TED Conference - Dave Eggers - idea

This came out of the TED.com conference this week:

http://onceuponaschool.org

Dave Eggers - author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - was one of three winners of the TED prize, and wished for:

"I wish that you - you personally and every creative individual and organization you know - will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have 1,000 examples of transformative change."

Little is more transformative than seeing that a school in the developing world gets safe drinking water, single gender sanitation and hygiene education. Kids have the opportunity to go to school, they - especially girls - have the change to stay in school, they suffer fewer cases of diarrheal and other waterborne diseases, they continue their educations past secondary school, they wait longer to start families, they have more economic opportunities, and so on.

Patty Hall is a schoolteacher from Minnesota who has recently launched H2O For Life: School to School.

"H2O for Life is the “sleeping giant” that lies within the potential of students and teachers in schools to raise funds to support people in need."

Check out their projects - Kenya, Mozambique, Mali, Nicaragua... transformative change indeed. Give Dave Eggers a call.