Costco Connection - July 2009

C h anging

wthoe rld Costco members a redoing

t heir part

A near–mountain top
experience

FOR 16 YEARS, Greg Mortenson, a Costco member in Bozeman, Montana, and co-author of New York Times best seller Three Cups of Tea, has been working for peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan. His battleground has been the classroom.

“The real enemy, whether you’re in Pakistan or Africa or the United States, is ignorance, because it is ignorance that breeds hatred,” he recently told The Connection in a phone interview.

Three Cups of Tea documents how

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RDINARY PEOPLE—men, women and children from all walks of life, all religions, political persuasions and philosophies—have long risen to challenges in their communities, seeking answers and solutions for social problems.

They start organizations or foundations or dedicate themselves to participating in projects as part of a larger group or by themselves. Today people are working for their local communities and the greater global community as well, sparked by the accessibility of worldwide news via the Internet. According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics ( nccs.urban.org), 956,760 public charities and 112,959 private foundations are registered with the Internal Revenue Service. From 1996 to 2006, the

Mortenson, 51, a former mountain climber and emergency room nurse, stumbled into the remote Himalayan village of Korphe, lost and sick, following a 1993 failed attempt to summit K2, the second-highest peak in the Himalayas. As the villagers cared for him out of their meager resources, he noticed that there was no school for the children.

numbers for IRS nonprofit categories grew at rates ranging from 36 to 95 percent. That doesn’t even begin to account for people who are acting independently, working with their own funds, and thus not required to report to the IRS.

“We are in the midst of a rare, fundamental structural change in society: Citizens and citizen groups are beginning to operate with the same entrepreneurial and competitive skill that has driven business ahead over the last three centuries,” says Bill Drayton, the founder and CEO of Ashoka (www. ashoka.org), an organization founded in 1981 to pioneer social change by investing in individuals and organizations with a vision. “The millennia when only a tiny elite could cause change are coming to an end.”

We found that many Costco members are involved in just this sort of change. Here are a few of their stories.—Steve Fisher

A teacher visited three days a week, but the children met every day outdoors on a patch of bare ground where many scratched out their lessons with sticks in the dirt. “The fierce resolve in the children to learn impressed me. When one of the kids asked me to help build a school, I realized that was the real reason I had come to the village,” Mortenson says.

( www.ikat.org), the foundation he established, has built more than 78 permanent schools and 48 temporary schools in remote and often volatile areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan— places where few opportunities for education existed before. The foundation has trained hundreds of teachers who