How to Start Your Own Nonprofit and Fight World or Local Hunger, Child Labor, Sexual Slavery, or Human Trafficking

How can you fight hunger from Sacramento to developing nations overseas? Your first step might be to start up your own nonprofit organization to conquer starvation and dirty water. Take inspiration from the Davis, CA nonprofit, Little World Community Organization. Check out the site for information about Sacramento's Greg Zaller.

In addition to fighting world hunger, how would you like to follow in the path of that organization, setting up 29 schools for 3,000 rural Pakistani women and children like Greg Zaller has done? Students make embroidered greeting cards for sale here. What would you like to organize today in Sacramento in the way of a nonprofit reflecting your social conscience? Check out the website of Davis-based, Freedom from Hunger.

Zaller, in his fifties, of Nevada City, in the Sacramento regional area, initially went to Pakistan in 2006 after passing up his annual vacation for a chance to help others. Zaller went with a 12-by-12 wood frame and sheet-metal home design to help Pakistanis get out of tents.

Upon his return, a small team of volunteers rallied to help Zaller. And they have found a new home design using straw bales. About 100 of the original homes have been built and the original wood design is still being used in remote mountain areas pummeled by the quake. But that design called for long hauls of material and a mill on site to construct the homes. Zaller and his team turned to a straw bale design that will take a few days longer to build but costs only $50, compared to $300 for the original homes.

Zaller, a Sacramento educator and builder in the Sacramento-Davis area, became involved with Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake there that killed 78,000. He organized the villagers of Hilkot to build a safe shelter working in teams. Then he returned to Sacramento to raise funds for the completion.

The idea is that, Zaller is convinced that grass roots educational change will save Pakistan. He partnered with a young man named Aneel Mushtaq, and they started Little World Community Organization. In the organization, poor women learn to become teachers who in turn educate families and are celebrated as bringing action and hope to those developing communities building back after the earthquake. Their motto is that they can only help themselves by helping others and to never give up. Greg Zaller has been funding 22 schools.

At last, women are gaining the skills to earn money and continue on their own. According to the Little World Community website, "Greg believes that within the impoverished of the world we will find the key to a better future."

You might also check out the nonprofit Davis, CA organization, Freedom from Hunger, which is located at 1644 DaVinci Court - Davis, CA 95618. Get inspired by Zaller do start your own nonprofit and fight hunger, either in Sacramento or overseas. If you're out of work and about to become homeless, think of the alternative. You could start your own nonprofit someday, but for now, volunteering for one is one way to learn about organizing while helping out somewhere in the world, even in your own neighborhood right here in Sacramento.

Sacramento area residents are volunteering to work for at least 121 Sacramento nonprofit agencies or services to fight against sexual slavery, human trafficking, bad water, starvation, diseases, and child labor in foreign countries. According to the Sacramento Bee May, 2010 article, "More capital-area nonprofits join fight to aid the world." At the same time, more Sacramento students are opening their own nonprofits to help fight poverty overseas.

Is the lingering recession and unemployment driving an increasing number of Sacramentans to fight AIDS, pollution, child labor, and kids being sold from the age of three into sexual slavery or human trafficking, the latest form of selling people into slavery for the profit of the pimps in developing nations?

The number of Sacramento residents dedicated to international relief has risen, according to Guidestar, that gives out information on the 1.8 million nonprofits in the USA. Even back home, more Sacramentans are finding ways to battle poverty locally from making birthday parties for homeless kids to having classes in video production for homeless teens living in shelters.

And for professionals who have careers where they are not so easily laid off, such as physicians, you find numerous Sacramento surgeons going to Myanmar, India, Vietnam, and China to restore eyesight or treat infections. Take UC Davis for example. You have students at UC Davis educating and feeding African children dealing with AIDS. According to the Sacramento Bee article, recently a UC Davis student start a nonprofit to educate and feed Namibian children with AIDS.

In Sacramento area's elementary and high schools, you see kids raising money for Haiti by offering bake sales or basketball games. According to the Sacramento Bee article, in 2005 Grass Valley builder, Greg Zaller, went overseas to rebuild homes for quake victims and build a school for women and children--in Pakistan.

You have a Sacramento area pastor and wife moving to Cambodia to rescue girls from sexual slavery. That's what Rocklin pastor, Don Brewster and his wife, Bridget did. Is it the thing to do when your children are grown? Do you sell your home and move to Southeast Asia to help stop sexual slavery? That's what Sacramentans are doing, according to the Sacramento Bee article. So how do you find work to do like that overseas?

Let's say you want to organize a team to go overseas and make a difference. Your first step might be to check out the website, Idealist.org. The site guides you to jobs, volunteer work, events, and other activities to get involved in if you're interested in getting connected to the global conscience inside you. If you're about doing some good deeds, some acts of kindness, building, repairing, or caring, check out Idealist.org. Your purpose in going to the site would be to connect yourself with nonprofit jobs around the world or locally.

What do you want to organize, teams to fight international poverty? Sexual slavery? Human trafficking? Rural poverty? The abuse of children globally? Your next step might be to check out the site of the charity watchdog, the American Institute of Philanthropy. You don't have to be rich and famous like Bill Gates to get involved with philanthropy. So many people are activists when it comes to trying to get their names of lists for charities asking for money.

If you turn the tables around, maybe you'd prefer to be on the other end of actually volunteering to work in another country to do some repairing, caring, and sharing, for example, like doing something about child labor, dirty water, starvation, or diseases? Another angle is not only stopping the ravages of disease overseas, but doing something about what happens when the disease comes home as it has done with Dengue fever arriving recently in the USA from tropical areas overseas.

Those volunteering in Sacramento include people who have recently lost their jobs. If you look at who in Sacramento is donating money to charities, the money is coming from Granite Bay, Roseville, Davis, and Folsom. It's not coming from modest homes near Broadway or from the retirees living solely on social security retirement benefits living in tiny homes off of Marconi or Watt Avenues.

What's happened is now that fewer dollars are being given to charities because more people are out of work, but what's increasing at the same time are volunteers going overseas to work. It's as if, when your house is foreclosed, your job eliminated for good, the choice is yours--become homeless with your family, or take your family to a third world country to build up that country in exchange for room and board for you and your family, and maybe enough of a tiny stipend to get you back home someday.

It's a better alternative that what faces you -- sleeping in your car or van on Sacramento streets, or moving with kids to a homeless shelter, if the other alternatives are full or used up--such as low-cost housing. Maybe you still have some savings. Should you sell your home, move to Bali or Cambodia, and set up shop volunteering if you have a skill or profession, such as nursing or being a doctor or builder of rough terrain wheelchairs? Southeast Asia and Africa are calling. So are lots of other places.

Basically, more out-of-work Sacramentans are volunteering to move to developing nation countries to rescue orphans or do other good deeds. The Sacramento Bee article mentions real estate "eco-urban" developer, Levi Benkert, 28 moving with his family in 2009 to Ethiopia, motivated by the real estate crash in Sacramento. His goal--to rescue orphans. He's now back in Sacramento, having created the nonprofit, Drawn From Water.

Then Benkert, his wife, Jessie, and children - Nickoli, 9, Luella, 6, and Ruth, 3 - moved to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. According to the Sacramento Bee article, they are working on arranging U.S. adoptions for some, which Benkert said will start in June.

How You Can Help from Sacramento

Little World Community Organization needs your help. It's made up of a small group of volunteers. Everyone does what he or she can. No one gets paid money, but rather earns the satisfaction that each individual is truly helping to make the world a better place.

The emphasis has been on the slow patient task of tilling the soil, planting the seeds and nurturing the growth. Now there are thousands of women who see themselves as teachers who in turn are educating others to become teachers, and the organization needs help in every area.

Some Ideas How You Can Help Fight World Hunger from Sacramento

1. Buy a group of cards and resell them using a point of purchase display in a local store (see How to Sell Cards).
2. Help with distribution of the cards to the people in #1. above.
3. Office and writing.
4. Develop the organization's web presence through its site, Facebook and beyond.
5. Teach English over skype to the organization's high speed internet centers set up in remote Pakistani villages that are coming soon.
6. Help to develop new products suitable for manufacture and sale through micro businesses.
7. Manage volunteers so that they can see what they are doing is making a contribution.
8. Spread this concept in new and creative ways. Pakistan is just the beginning. See the co-living network site.
9. Take on the World Friendship Quilt, the first global art project. It's an embroidery made up of squares from every corner of the earth to be visible on Google earth.
10. Interface with village student artisans and help them to develop new products to sell and develop businesses.
11. It doesn't matter what you know, you can help if you truly want. The organization will think of something.
12. Finally, if you want to donate money, you can do so to this PayPal LINK into an account held by Creative Learning Adventures USA 501(C)3 ID 20-3261311 whose mission statement is to empower through education. Since everyone in LWCO are volunteer, all funds go directly to learning support purchases.
13. Please contact Greg Zaller at: gregzaller@gmail.com. If you want to change the world from the ground up, you are welcome at LWCO.