Birth of a Movement: Entreprenuers Striving to Change the World

So Letsgetglobal.org is up and functioning. I still haven’t done a major announcement yet. Next week.

Next week I’m also planning to spend a day at the Library of Congress searching for foundations who offer planning grants.  I will begin with query letters. I need a coordinator…and someone who will work the social networks. (I don’t know how people have time to have a life and keep up with the Tweet/Facebook/blog world.)

I love all the people who have helped me out along the way, most really nice caring young people……….but volunteer work is not number one in their lives. School, jobs, internships, family all come first. I need to have someone on salary! I would like LGG to be the job that they have to show up at every day. And for that, I need to have funding.

I’m about to send out a lengthy listserv letter…probably tomorrow. If you’re not on my list, send me an e-mail and I’ll send you an invitation to join.(femalenomad@ritagoldengelman.com) It will be mostly about LGG and what we’ve been doing and what we need. If you want to volunteer, send me a note.

At the moment, I’m looking for around five schools across the country who want to be in our pilot program, high schools that you know would cooperate with letting kids know that there’s an option to going straight into college. Once we have the schools, we will put together volunteer teams to work with the faculty, the students, and the parents. If you have a school-candidate…and if you would like to be on the team, let me know. We’re working on a volunteer kit.

Have to run to the supermarket to get the ingredients for the Vietnamese PHO I’m making for tomorrow’s guests.

See ya.   Rita

I can’t believe I haven’t written since Feb. 22nd. I’m sorry.

On the 24th I flew to California to spend a couple of days at Scripps College in Claremont. I was hosted by Juliana Lacerda Sobral and her dog, Veggie, who somehow managed to find her way (Veggie, that is) into my bed in the middle of the night on the 25th. She clearly wanted to play!

Scripps is a 900 student girls’ college that is part of a seven-school group all located within a mile of each other. They share both classes and facilities. The invitation came about when Maya Higgins (an RA and a senior) read the nomad book and decided she wanted to meet me. I’m sure it wasn’t easy, but somehow she managed to get together the funding for my trip.

I had meals with Scripps students, visited Sycamore elementary school where I talked to second and third graders, and addressed a crowd of around 150. My talk was about my life, my new book, and of course, Let’s Get Global. I flew in on Wednesday and back on Friday and I’m still a little bit jet-lagged. Or maybe it’s just the cold I seemed to have picked up along the way. Anyway, I loved the school and the reception.

I came home to a box of books…the uncorrected bound proofs of my anthology, Female Nomad and Friends. The publisher puts these together to send to media that have a long lead time and to high profile people who might want to write a blurb for the cover. (If you have any personal connections to well-known celebrities, do let me know!!)

I just spent two days writing a letter to someone I’m hoping will want to join us in a partner deal. I’m not saying who, but the letter will go out with books on Friday. If the deal happens, I’ll let you know. As you know…all royalties will go to slum kids in New Delhi for scholarships to vocational schools.

I now have www.letsgetglobal.org up and running. It’s not there yet, but it is a beginning. Now I’m ready to go after some funding. I desperately need a paid coordinator and a social network person; my experience with volunteers is that if they’re not officially employed and paid, they somehow disappear. Can’t blame them; life gets in the way if it’s not a real job.

Enough. I’ll be back. I’m now in the business of collecting names of like-minded family foundations for funding requests. Know any?

I just spent two days in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the National Conference on International Youth Exchange. I had a great time. On Friday I talked to 250 high school students about my life and the joy of crossing cultures. At one point five boys came over to where I was after the talk and asked if they could give me a hug. You gotta believe I loved it!

The Charlotte- Mecklenberg schools are committed to preparing their students to be “globally competitive,”  and they were one of the sponsors of the conference. The other was CSIET. They were both gracious and on top of everything. Tara, Kelly, John, John, Beth, Lindsay…..great job. Congratulations.

There were people and programs from all over the country and world. The thing that everybody shared was a passion for helping young people extend their education across borders. On Saturday I gave a talk to the conference attendees. Lots of interesting and committed people.

I just launched a website for LGG (it was a big push to get it up for the conference):  www.letsgetglobal.org  I’m open to comments, additions, suggestions, etc. The more specific, the better. I really do want your help.

Luckily, last week Jeewon Kim walked through my door (after e-mailing me) and saved me. Jeewon is a young lawyer just back from nine months around the world and…here’s the best part for me…not working yet!! She came over several days and got me through the creation of that site, sitting next to me and working her magic on the computer. She spoke the language and was able to communicate with Dave who was creating the site.

Once Jeewon figured out that I am organizationally challenged, she would give me assignments overnight. ” Here are the four things I want you to do before I get here tomorrow.”  I loved it.  Jeewon, thank you.

I just came from trying to edit the LGG site and messed up a few things…I haven’t mastered the technical part and my saviour, Dave Chase, who designed and got it up and running, isn’t available today. So, if you find links that don’t work, lines that need spaces, type with the wrong size font, and pages without pictures, they will be fixed.

I would love your input on content…what’s there and what isn’t. Please send it to me at: info@letsgetglobal.org. The more specific, the better.

The look and technical expertise (before I messed it up today) has to be credited to Dave. He’s a 20-year-old college student and very talented. We’ve only met virtually. If you’re thinking of starting up a blog or website, check him out. dave@davidechase.com. You’ll be surprised at how reasonable he is….costwise….he’s building a reputation and a portfolio. He certainly gets my vote.

Get in on the ground floor; you’ll be glad you did. He was even cheerful as he answered all my questions, executed all my instructions, and corrected all my mistakes. I just now sent him another e-mail asking him to correct my corrections from today. There were several days last week when we were e-mailing dozens of times a day. He never once alluded to my dumb questions and inability to organize my thoughts. I know there were a couple of nights when he didn’t get much sleep. I’ve been dragging on this for months…then of course it had to be finished tomorrow!

Please go there immediately and have a look:  www.letsgetglobal.org. Then write me an e-mail:  info@letsgetglobal.org.

I have a list of four things to do before Monday. I stared at it all day and did other things, like eat and answer unrelated e-mails. Tomorrow they will all happen: a list of articles, two letters to edit for the website, organization of testimonials, and a program list. Yes. Tomorrow! Definitely.

It’s been snowing forever in Washington. My little tiny city backyard is full of downed branches from the southern magnolia tree, huge branches. Those giant leaves caught so much heavy snow that the branches just split off. I find it interesting that the white stuff from above has virtually closed down the most powerful government in the world….not terrorism or bad policies, but snow! Government offices, schools, buses, metros, airports…all out of commission.

I had to get myself to FedEx yesterday to mail the galleys for my anthology, Female Nomad and Friends, Tales of Breaking Free and Breaking Bread Around the World, to Crown and I stopped two different strange men and one woman in the street and asked them to hold my hand while I climbed over mounds of snow at crosswalks. People are great in crises.

I’m still trying to get some content written so I can get a partial website for Let’s Get Global up before the National School Conference on International Youth Exchange in Charlotte, NC, next week. I’m keynoting the meeting and also talking to a group of high school students from the area.

OK. Back to the website. I am extraordinarily skilled at avoiding writing; it’s one of my most accomplished talents.

Love, Rita

I’ve been overwhelmed. Last week I was in NY meeting with the PR and marketing people at Crown. My anthology, “Female Nomad and Friends: Tales of Breaking Free and Breaking Bread Around the World,” will be out in June and we’re planning a PR and marketing campaign. The people who are working on this are wonderfully enthusiastic. It’s exciting. (All royalties will go to send poor kids in India to vocational schools.) I still have to proof the galleys….they’re that 6″ pile of pages here on my desk!

I’m also pushing to get a Let’s Get Global website up before the National School Conference on International School Exchange that CSIET is sponsoring. I will be talking about my life and introducing the LGG project to local  high school students and to the schools that will be attending from all over the country. The conference is in Charlotte, North Carolina on the 19th and 20th of February.

Ashley Tacub sat next to me on the bus from NY to DC. We talked a lot on the five-hour trip, and she’s now helping me with the LGG website, researching gap year programs. Sarah LaRosa, a Peace Corps alumna, is working on the parent section. There is so much enthusiasm for LGG. It seems that anyone who hears about it wants to help. I love the new people I’m meeting through this. I know we’re going to succeed!

Be back soon.    Rita

The teepee became a Christmas tree, no leaves. Just a bamboo structure with lights. We all love it. Check it out on my Facebook site. I built it from scratch….bamboo poles from a throwaway pile on the lot next door, tied together in teepee shape with leaves from a banana tree on our property (my son’s house in Todos Santos, Mexico). The family loves it. And we assume Santa did too since he was very generous to five-year-old Cris.

After a long absence, I am thinking again about the website and the fundraising for Let”s Get Global. I spent a portion of today studying something called a LogFrame. It’s a carefully worked out logical way to present our project to foundations. I need a couple more days to live with the structure. Logic has never been my strength. But I can see how clear and sensible the logframe is….and I want to go after that funding soon with the best presentation I can create. Once I get it down, I will be working with the US office of Servas, our fiscal sponsor. Most important at this point is to get the website up, the applications for funding out there, and a coordinator to work with. I am so totally a team worker and I can’t wait until we can hire a staff, not just a coordinator but a couple of others to handle things like the social networking, major PR,  and volunteer coordination. It’ll happen. Just not as quickly as I’d like. Happy New Year.

d ris.