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Vaga Lume Association is a Brazilian non-profit organization founded in 2001 grounded in the belief that investing in people is the best way to transform a reality. Its mission is to create opportunities for cultural exchange by reading, writing and orality, valuing the empowerment of people and rural communities of the Brazilian Legal Amazon region. Vaga Lume works in 160 rural communities (indigenous, riverside, roadside, rural settlement people or quilombolas - Brazilian with African descent) of 23 municipalities in the Brazilian Legal Amazon region, which encompasses nine federal states (Acre, Amapa, Amazonas, Maranhao, Mato Grosso, Para, Rondonia, Roraima and Tocantins), occupies 59% of the Brazilian territory and has 20 million people (12% of the Brazilian population). Despite the fact that education and culture are basic social rights, protected by the Brazilian Constitution and under human rights international treaties ratified by Brazil, its access and implementation in the Amazon region are very limited. It is one of the poverty zones in Brazil - with a GDP per capita 30% lower than the national value - where 42% of the population survives with less than US$ 5.00 a day. Due to the outstanding impact of Vaga Lume's work in the region, the organization is recognized by many international and national awards such as the Juscelino Kubitschek Award of Merit for Regional Development in Latin America and the Caribbean given by the Inter-American Development Bank (2009); the Millennium Development Goals Award, conferred by the United Nations and the Brazilian government (2005); the Vivaleitura Award, from the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education (2008); and the Chico Mendes Environment Award, given by the Ministry of Environment (2006 and 2008). In 2011, Vaga Lume received its most important recognition: the 4th place at the Intercultural Innovation Award, conferred by United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and the BMW Group. As an awardee, in 2012, Vaga Lume was welcomed to the World Intercultural Facility for Innovation (WIFI), a network formed by the UNAOC, the BMW Group and the ten 2011 winners. Through this network, the UNAOC and the BMW Group challenged all winners to replicate and scale up their actions to promote intercultural dialogue and offered training, consultancy and institutional support to assist organizations to accomplish such results.

Africa Schoolhouse (ASH) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing quality education, medical care, job training and clean water to rural villages in Northern Tanzania. In order to achieve these goals, ASH works in partnership with communities and the local government to build desperately needed schools, deep wells and medical clinics, creating an environment that enables residents to live full, productive and healthy lives. ASH was founded in 2006 after village elders from Ntyula, Tanzania approached founder Dr. Aimee Bessire with the idea of building a school for their children and a medical clinic for the entire community. Dr. Bessire, who has a decades long relationship with the people of Ntulya, was determined to take action. Within six months, the Africa Schoolhouse board was assembled. ASH broke ground on its first project, the Ntulya Primary School and campus, in July 2008 and completed construction in 2010. President of Tanzania, Jakaya Kikwete, personally inaugurated the new school and declared it a model for all rural schools in the country. The villagers talked about how proud they were that the President came to visit the school they had helped to build. Following the request of the Ntulya elders, the organization completed a modern medical clinic the following year, which now serves approximately 4,500 people. ASH continued working with local communities in the region to identify need and completed the renovation of Mwaniko Secondary School and Shilanona Primary School in 2012 and 2014. Improvements at these locations included building a bio-chemistry lab and the installation of the first solar-powered computer lab in Misungwi District. ASH also trained a local work-force to help with the construction and continued maintenance of these projects. ASH's newest project is to construct an all-girls boarding school-the first in Misungwi District. This exemplary school will provide space for 360 girls in Forms 1-4, with the possibility to expand the campus and add another 80 girls in Forms 5-6 as needed in later years. Currently only 1% of Tanzanian girls complete secondary school education. They face a wide range of obstacles to their education, including everything from families who privilege the education of sons over daughters, to girls being married off at young ages, and unsafe journeys to school. One of the largest issues faced by girls is finding a safe place to live while pursuing their education. In this rural area, many girls travel long distances to reach school. Safe passage to and from school is a critical issue. We want to provide a safe living situation for young women to delight in their education. ASH is partnering with Misungwi District to build a much-needed safe haven for girls, empowering them through education to grow into strong, healthy women. In addition to a standard academic curriculum, the school will also promote leadership, entrepreneurship, social justice and care for the environment. The school will create an essential safe space where young women can successfully complete their studies and grow into empowered, independent adults. As with our other projects ASH is collaborating with the local communities, school committee, and Tanzanian government. We are building this school at the request of the local community, who identified this as their greatest need. The school will be staffed and run by the District once completed. The District has selected Florencia Ndabashe to be the school's head teacher. Ndabashe currently leads a co-ed secondary school in Misungwi and brings great energy to her work. She will be a strong leader for the girls school, inspiring her fellow teachers and serving as an excellent role model for young women.

Fundacion Via Cocina is a community based project focused on improving the health and economic development of vulnerable women, youth and underprivileged in Medellin Colombia. With a personalized training and mentoring system sharing healthy food recipes, cooking techniques and applied financial planning and entrepreneurial small business fundamentals, we build a program for individuals and families based on their current reality, applying the training to objectives created with them, for them, in their own home. Additionally, we provide classes to individuals and groups who want to learn to cook healthy dishes with local ingredients for their families, transforming them into uncommon flavors that are low in fat, oil, salt and sugar-free. These activities look to decrease frequency and severity of non-communicable diseases in the communities, including obesity, diabetes and cholesterol.

The National Farmers Foundation has a board of directors made up of five persons known for their commitment to education and research for the benefit of the family farm in Canada. The directors are in sympathy with the goals, objectives, and policy of the National Farmers Union. Representatives of various sectors in the country, such as family farmers, organic product marketers, new rural development groups, churches, rural youth and women, and urban consumers supported the establishment of the organization. Many of these have identified a vacuum with respect to accessible education and plain language research to help direct the crucial ventures in rural development which will mean not only survival, but the thriving of rural communities into the twenty - first century. A new awareness of the interdependence of rural and urban communities creates a challenge to promote action-oriented education and research which will create and enhance positive rural/urban cooperation.

In any given year Search and Rescue groups in BC respond to nearly 1000 incidents involving over 1300 missing (lost) or injured persons. Our 2500 unpaid professional volunteers, located in more than 80 BC communities are available day or night. Together these men and women donate over 100,000 hours of their time on callouts annually, and an astounding 95% subjects were found or rescued within the first 24 hours of a volunteer SAR group being activated. This volunteer service offers tremendous value for citizens and visitors alike. The cost to replace this volunteer service in direct salary dollars alone would exceed $5,000,000 annually (excluding infrastructure and capital costs, which are estimated at over 50 million dollars). BCSARA is proud of its role in making this service better.

Elimu is an international development organization based in Ottawa, Canada. We began undertaking projects in Kenya in 2006 as private individuals. Elimu was incorporated in January 2011 and received official charitable status from the Canadian government in March 2012. We are a board of directors of three Canadians. We also have a dynamic board of advisors and a volunteer administrator in Ottawa. The “office” of Elimu is a virtual set up run between Ottawa, Canada and Malindi, Kenya. For this reason there is currently only a P.O. Box address. Our Founder covers the overhead costs of the Canadian organization so that our donors' dollars go straight into projects. Our projects include a small home for children, building a nursery school for a village community and supporting young women to gain income-generating skills.

Our mission is to develop, manage and support projects focused on community work, generate awareness, respect and education for the proper use of resources for the benefit of our environment and environment. We promote sustainable human development as a fundamental intangible resource of our society, linking people, communities and institutions to the sustainable intervention of vulnerable contexts. Our Ludotecas project is a model of community social intervention whose challenge is to return the right to play and use of public spaces in a safe and adequate way to children who live in vulnerable contexts. Through a community program we promote the use of public space generating transformations that strengthen the social fabric of the community, improve the child's relationship with their socio-territorial environment and stimulate children's cognitive development. We work directly with the community and specifically with children between 3 and 12 years old looking to promote healthy play and child care through the community construction of spaces for the specific use of children, where we develop play workshops that promote the development of social, motor, cognitive, emotional and linguistic skills.

The Lethbridge Public Library connects you to ideas at our two community gathering places, the Main Branch in the heart of downtown and The Crossings Branch in West Lethbridge Centre, as well as on our Bookmobile which travels across the City. We invite you to log on to our 24/7 accessible virtual library at www.lethlib.ca. Visit the Library to enjoy speakers, forums, music, symposiums, an art gallery, festivals, craft fairs, info sessions, current events discussions, free Wi-Fi and public use computers. Our youth programs begin with babes and extend right up to toddlers, tweens and teens. We have a vibrant adult literacy program at the Main Branch called 'Read On'. Your Library card gives you access to fabulous databases like Ancestry.ca and Mango. Use it to download your favourite eBooks, eAudiobooks and magazines. Borrow DVDs from our amazing Blockbusters Collection and take a bestseller home today from the popular TopReads Collection. In 2012 730,460 people visted the Library.

Located in an easily accessible building at Yonge & Eglinton, WSC has established a business environment which provides immigrants with Canadian workplace experience, settlement counselling and referrals to needed services, technical skills training in accounting and office administration, and bridge-to-work programs. Client feedback is extremely positive, relected in the fact that the majority of referrals are word of mouth from satisfied customers. The agency works in collaboration with other organzations serving women, immigrants and the unemployed including several umbrella groups and Memorandums of Understanding with other programs to ensure that clients receive all needed services. A donation of just $10.00 per month = a subsidy for an isolated woman to take a needed skills upgrade; A donation of just $500 = a subsidy for a newcomer to enrol in Diploma program and receive Canadian credentials; A donation of just $200 = career exploration and work placement services

Bhutan has a unique identity as the last sovereign, independent Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas. Despite its tiny size and its small population, and despite its powerful neighbors- Tibet and China to the north and India to the south, Bhutan has never been occupied by invading forces. This means it has retained a very ancient and vibrant culture that is deeply Buddhist in all its aspects. Most of the population are subsistence farmers and herders barely making a living on difficult, remote and road-less mountainous terrain. Per capita annual income is one of the world's lowest. But compassion, harmony, environmental protection and cultural preservation are traditional and key values in this country. As the country carefully integrates into the modern 21st century, it is more important than ever to establish mature and well educated women throughout the country - grounded in their culture and free to express their compassionate action both in their own country and abroad.

The project allows for the capital-poor community of Tanhoc to earn land title for their agricultural co-operative through verifiable enhancement of residents’ level of education. Previous efforts to obtain land title through a government loan program failed, as the community was unable to make payments. Pueblo Partisans provides an education credit for each community member that successfully completes a grade level at a recognized institution or successfully completes a course in a self-defined program of workshops. Recent workshops have included community planning, animal husbandry (pigs), and environmental restoration. Education credits, in turn, are applied to the annual installment of a concessional Guatemalan Land Fund (FONTIERRAS) loan. Credits are weighted to favour female achievements in education, to offset the unique obstacles women typically encounter. By way of this project, Tanhoc residents should be able to obtain clear land title by 2012 while improving their skills

Everyone thinks that some agency, probably a government funded one, protects and cares for wild animals in distress. This is not the case at all! Although in Canada and in the U.S. wildlife is legally protected by Federal and Provincial (or State) agencies, no government agency is responsible for the rescue, treatment and release of injured or orphaned wildlife. Cochrane Ecological Institute's Swift Fox Reintroduction programs began in 1972 under the direction of Beryl and Miles Smeeton. Since that time 0ver 800 Swift fox were reintroduced to the Canadian Prairie. This has resulted in the Species being downlisted by the Canadian Government from Extirpated to Endangered. WHALEFORCE was started, by the CEI, in 1988 as an international Cetacean survey using blue-water and coastal racing and cruising yachtsmen/women as participants. NEW for 2007: Visit www.happytailsretreat.com to see how your pet can help wildlife in need.