Giving from the Heart/Brooke Newell de Gunzburg
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| Event at the London Guildhall, London, June 1, 2007. Richard Regan, Sheriff of the City of London; Mark Goldring — CEO, Voluntary Services Overseas; Brooke Newell de Gunzburg; Simon Keyes — Director, St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace; Prem Rawat — Keynote Speaker |
[edit] Brooke Newell de Gunzburg
Thank you, Mark. That was just wonderful and so inspiring. We are just delighted to be working together with VSO. You’ve been making such a dramatic contribution for decades. And under your leadership, VSO has truly become a model for voluntary action, so congratulations and thank you.
Your Excellencies, my Lords, Aldermen, Mr. Sheriff, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a great pleasure to be with you tonight, and to share with you a little about the initiatives of The Prem Rawat Foundation, or TPRF, as many of you here tonight may not know too much about our Foundation.
Prem Rawat created the Foundation in 2001 with the vision of helping people in need around the world, and also to share a message of peace. We’re deeply honored that he is here in London tonight for this event, and we’re looking forward very much to hearing from him very soon.
Also with us tonight is Linda Pascotto, the Foundation’s president and under her very able and dedicated leadership, the Foundation has been thriving.
Sometimes the initiatives of the Foundation are related to disaster relief efforts in partnership with other organizations such as the United Nations World Food Programme, the United Nations Development Programme, Oxfam, or the Red Cross. But at other times, we spearhead our own aid and development initiatives. In providing aid, our primary focus is on clean drinking water and nourishing food. But more broadly, our goal is really to honor the dignity of people in need, and to provide basic necessities for them so that they can begin to help themselves.
To share with you just a few examples: In Ghana, water wells were constructed which allowed more than 15,000 villagers access to fresh drinking water so they would no longer have to walk for miles through unsafe conditions to fetch a bucket of water that might even be riddled with disease.
In Australia, TPRF has been funding ongoing nutritious breakfast programs for Aborigine children on a small island called Morningtown, and the improvement in their academic performance has been remarkable, and we hope will give them more options for their future.
In the Middle East, TPRF has actually been funding and helping with humanitarian assistance on both sides of the conflict. In particular, providing humanitarian assistance and fresh water in Israel and Lebanon.
These are just a few examples, and there are many more instances in particular where the Foundation has been helping people in need who’ve been experiencing very dramatic problems such as earthquakes, floods, severe storms, locust invasions, things of this nature. And The Prem Rawat Foundation has been actually helping these people ranging from Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, to Niger and Cote d’Ivoire to the United States, Mexico, Guatemala and Granada.
In addition, in India, because the need is so very great, The Prem Rawat Foundation has been focusing on helping people deal with the issue of blindness, and hoping to prevent blindness. Actually, 1/3 of the people in the world who are blind reside in India. And it’s sad because many of these cases could be prevented with early detection and proper care. So the Foundation is offering free clinics, providing medicine, eyeglasses, examinations and referrals to surgeons, which can make a real difference in improving the quality of life for these people.
Today, we’re delighted that the contribution to VSO will be used for much-needed assistance in Mozambique. And we’re honored to be working with you, Mark, and with VSO and we look forward very much to seeing the positive changes that this assistance will help with in Mozambique.
Regarding our longer-term developmental work, many large organizations—particularly humanitarian organizations—are primarily focusing on high population density areas, which makes very good economic sense. However, very often, many people are left behind who are in more remote, rural regions. So TPRF focuses its efforts on those people who are very often overlooked. Those people for whom just a few pence a day can be life-changing.
To take an example, a year ago, the Foundation launched a very special innovative initiative called Food for People in a remote tribal area in northern India. The people there are very resourceful, but sometimes obstacles are just too great. And due to overwhelming political and economic and social forces that are changing around them, severe malnutrition was crippling most of the adults not allowing them enough strength to be able to work and even to feed their children. So the little children were actually scavenging for insects which they could eat. And looking for rats’ nests that they could take food out of just to survive. And the older children—aged 8, 9, 10—were dropping out of school so that they could work just simply in exchange for food.
It’s a situation that was really a downward spiral for these people and they didn’t know how to get out of it. Their society was basically collapsing. So Prem Rawat observed this situation and he wanted to help the people. And he had a vision of a way to work closely, hands-on, with the villagers to co-create a solution together. It would honor their dignity, and their local traditions.
So, working very closely with the tribal elders, and in very close cooperation, plans were developed and a facility was constructed to be of assistance to them. And this was actually a food hall, 10,000 square feet, very modern, state-of-the-art, first class, to help these people get back on their feet.
The elders actually take responsibility for the facility for the long-term. The cooks were trained, the nutritional standards were set, the hygiene standards were set, and the villagers themselves grow a great deal of the food around the facility. The local people run the place and take great pride in keeping it clean. And to avoid dependency, actually only one meal a day was provided to adults and to children.
Well, in just one year in this short time, the progress has been extraordinary. The children have started to grow taller and stronger and the older children are back at school. The adults have actually regained their strength, they’re able to work and take care of their families, and they’re not even coming to the facility themselves anymore.
So this initiative is a heartwarming success and we’re very pleased to plan to be replicating it as a model in other marginalized areas where the people are suffering from chronic malnutrition, from poverty and from disease.
So tonight’s event is called Giving from the Heart. And truly, tonight is in honor of all those people who are so kind and so generous to be giving from their hearts to make the world a better place. Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure sharing with you. (Applause)
Before introducing our next guest, I’d like to just take this opportunity to thank a few people. Firstly, the Lord Mayor, the Sheriff and the cooperation of London for very kindly having this event here in this beautiful hall. The staff at Mansion House and at Guild Hall for their very kind assistance. Councilman Kevin Everett for all his great help in making this event possible. And Paul Robert’s solicitors—in particular, Paul Bloomfield, for the very remarkable contribution they’ve made towards the preparation of this event in recent months.
I’d now like to introduce Simon Keyes who is the Director of St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, one of the landmarks of the city that you may all be rather familiar with.
Simon Keyes has had a distinguished career, developing new initiatives aimed at helping the homeless and preventing crime. He was Director of Housing Aid Services, and actually the first manager of Revolving Doors, which is an agency that specializes in helping people with mental health problems within the criminal justice system. Simon also organized the Way of Peace 2000 initiative in Ireland with the Dalai Lama. We’re delighted to have you with us tonight, Simon. Would you please join me?
