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YOU have the power to change their lives around! DO IT!
Dear Friends, We welcome and thank you for visiting with us. We hope your curiosity will result in an understanding of what poverty truly is and what we can do together to effectively wipe it off the map.
So I took the step. It was never a tentative one. In my heart I felt and knew poverty can be eradicated. With no funding or funds, I began this journey. I chose to begin in the Island of Samar* one of the poorest provinces in the Philippines and one I was familiar with (I was from there originally). I went into communities and met with anyone and everyone who had a story to tell and an opinion to share. And it was through the poor themselves that I learned the fight against poverty is not and cannot be a fly over or a drive by. The fight is and must be a deliberate, purposeful, and committed effort and must be over the long haul!!! And while the approach must be multi dimensional since poverty is very complex, one cannot apply one salve for all the poor either (this is where we differ from the rest). A top official from Barangay (barrio) Palale in Samar once told a crowd in my presence that the difference between Building Futures Together and everyone else who try to help the poor is that Building Futures Together is still in their community 10 years after we began, while others have come in, poked their heads, injected them with some anti-poverty salve of some sort and moved on never to be seen or heard from again!
Poverty is deeply rooted; it involves people who are illiterate; with no access to healthcare, or hospitals or clinics; it involves people used and abused by the powers that be (political, religious, social) over centuries, it involves people bypassed by accepted channels of communication and information further isolating these communities from resources that might be available to them. The poor are entirely at a loss on paths to lead them out of poverty. They have no maps to follow; no consultants to consult with; no support group; no ladders to move up on! They depend entirely on you and I to guide them out of one of the most devastating human disasters of all time – poverty!
Join us in this very challenging but satisfying journey. Our three prong programs of help and hope: livelihood, education and health management, simultaneously applied one community at a time over a long haul, do alter lives while maintaining the dignity, self respect and more importantly, the independence and freedom of those we help.
Sincerely, Loudette N. Avelino President and Founder
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The objective of Building Futures Together is to
eradicate poverty one community at a time. This is an extremely
ambitious objective, and highly unlikely to be achieved, friends and colleagues
have said to me. After all, major organizations, including the United
Nations, institutions, churches, governments, powerful and wealthy celebrities
have lent their names and mammoth resources behind this war on poverty, plowing
millions and billions almost incessantly to the effort over several decades!
I joined the battle against poverty in earnest on realization that individuals,
families and communities living in dire want I had met decades ago as a child,
are now their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Is this
divine design that you and I and our children and grandchildren live in relative
comfort and two-thirds of the world’s population meander on this earth from
birth to death living like sub humans? Seeing the exact same families
living in poverty reared an ugly fact -- fathers and mothers of the poor are
bequeathing poverty to their children and grandchildren! That is all they have
to give! Something is so very wrong. Something is so very cruel. All the
resources pouring out of the cadre of institutions to help the poor and nothing
has changed!
