For my organizational paper I plan on focusing on how the civil society is increasing in size and how they are needed in our society in order to promote the awareness of issues dealing with human needs. I plan on using the issue with human trafficking and IPS’s response and programs as an example to back up my case.

Here are a few interesting things I found about my group’s country China’s nonprofit sector:

• Nonprofits were practically nonexistent before the 1980s, the majority began to appear in the mid-90s as a response to the government decreasing social service programs in order to create a more market based economy. In 2005, the nonprofit had risen to 150,000 from it only being 6,000 in 1999.
• China’s nonprofit sector’s biggest challenge in meeting the rising demands for social issues are due to the lack of business resources (management training and skills) and funding.
• Very little of China’s funding for charities actually come from China, 80% of their donations are from international corporations and organizations, compared to the US’s 5% international contributions.
• 85% of the available funds go towards the government affiliated nongovernmental organizations (NGO).

A few questions I have about the civil society is:

-What are the steps in creating a nonprofit? Funding it?

- How will I be able to apply what I read in this class to actual work in the nonprofit field? ie. the theories we read.

-How important is research? or does it depend on the organization?

-Grants? Grant-writing?

The most important thing that I learned in this course is that nonprofits are apart of what is termed the “civil society” or the “3rd sector.” I never gave a thought about all of those associations, organizations, groups, foundations, think tanks, etc and linking them together and putting them in one big category. But one thing that stands tall in all our discussions is that to be considered “legally” to be apart of the civil society in America they must fall under the 501c category. The civil society makes up a lot of our daily lives without us even realizing it. A lot of for-profit corporations either donate to nonprofits or create a foundation that somehow gives back to the community. Even with all of these definitions, I feel that people will always feel that the nonprofit sector or the third sector’s main goal should be the helping of something, whether the community, kids, animals, the disabled, or etc. That will continue to prevail in people’s thoughts when discussing nonprofits despite the wide range of subcategories that fall under it.

So I just realized I didn;t post a my EL comment post with the others…So I’ll post one now.

I decided to comment on porkchopsmom’s EL blog on the Ronald McDonald Foundation. I thought it was great that this foundation was brought up. I have always new about the RMHC Foundation but I never paid that much attention to it. The only thing I knew about it was that it dealt with kids and that I would drop my change into the slot when I paid with cash at McDonalds, I do the same thing when I go to Chipotle and their tip bowl. But I never knew that RMHC had so many programs or scholarships. I just never gave it that much thought but I guess McDonalds can do something good despite all of the negative press it recieves. Also there are ways for people to volunteer and support the foundation outside of dropping change while your buying your BigMac.

Since I wasn’t able to make to class last week, I decided to skim through some of the other readings randomly. I decided to write about China and Egypt’s funding. In the NGOs as Civil Society Actors on Media Policy Change in Egypt I read that the majority of their funding they depended on was from foreign funding. I thought that was interesting because in the same article it mentioned that NGOs had to go through the gov’t in order to apply to recieve foreign funding and that the gov’t is very restrictive and linking up with the foreign corps/orgs may have a negative effect on their image.  I found this linking to China a bit due to 80% of China’s funding comes from foreign  funding.

So the nonprofit I came across that blogs is GreenPeace.  GreenPeace as everyone knows, is a environmental organization whose goal is to promote peace and be activists for the environment. I am wishy-washy when it comes to GreenPeace, on some levels I comend them for their efforts and goals. But on the other hand they sometimes remiond me of Peta, in the way that people may view them as a terrorist group. But I have included their blog website for you to check out and also on the right of the page they links to some of their members/staffs’ affiliated blogs.

http://weblog.greenpeace.org/makingwaves/index.html

Today was a very busy day.

After interviewing my old boss and heading back to Mason. I went into DC for my first DC Stop Modern Day Slavery group meeting. I found it to be extremely interesting, there were a lot of new people and people of various ages. But what I thought was very interesting was the fact that they had a speaker come and talk about SHared International’s Demand documentary.  Shared International is a nonprofit that focuses on rescuing women and children in crisis. I’ve seen the short version of it but never the full length version of it (though we only watched half of it). But this documentary spoke about the main reason behind the human trafficking is due to the huge demand for it. It goes on to point out different examples about how a lot of things we let slide and the fact of the increase of porn industry and how all of that is linked. For example, it mentioned the term “pimp”. Here in America, it is seen as good and as bad at the same time. No one really wants to think about prostitutes being forced into prostitution, just that she has no morals or is on drugs, blahblah. But we see it as wrong, but then we have tv shows called Pimp My Ride or Snoop’s depiction of a pimp/him hanging out with Bishop Don Juan. The fact that there are scenes in our video games like Grand Theft Auto with the street walkers, it kind of makes us numb to certain things after a while. I’m not saying that is the reason behind human trafficking. I think people take advantage of situations and are always looking for easy ways to make money.  One thing from the night that summed up what I feel is the true basis behind human trafficking was that people just don’t think about it. They think of it as being a one time thing or that eventhough it is illegal or shady, our society kind of turns it’s head in the other directions sometimes.

Shared International also came to our GMU a few weeks ago, I don’t know if anyone caught their showing but I had to work that day…

Here is a link where you can watch the Demand documentary there are 3 versions (brief, condensed, full):

http://www.sharedhope.org/what/enddemand3.asp

and the pdf that goes along with it:

http://www.sharedhope.org/files/DEMAND.pdf

So today, I visited my old internship, NATSO (National Association of Truck Stop Operators) Foundation to interview my boss for my EL paper. In this interview Sharon, the executive director of NATSO Foundation, brought up a good point. She pointed out that everyone is effected by the trucking industry. Almost everything, we purchase is transported on a truck, even if it was made in China. There has to be a way for the products to get to your home or to the retailer. So that really got me thinking. During my time at my internship, I could not understand why truck stops would need an association. But now that it was put in that viewpoint, I understand. With the changing of gas prices and the up and downs of the economies, it affects so many factors in our lives. For example, this previous year the increasion of gas prices had a major influence on the increasion of prices in our products, especially groceries.

So here is a little bit of background information on the NATSO Foundation:

NATSO Foundation is a subsidiary of NATSO, Inc, a trade corporation. They were created in 1989, it was formed to disberse the scholarships. The foundation is funded by their endowment (the interest made off of stocks they had invested in order to gather money for the foundation), their annual fundraiser, and their major gift fund (donations from sponsors). The NATSO Foundation’s mission is to use their geographic advantage to take care of everyone who travels along the interstate system. They help connect the truck stops with their community.

I found my interview with Sharon to be very enlightening since I never really asked her direct questions about the purpose of NATSO having a foundation, so that cleared some things up for me.

So before Amy’s talk, I never really gave Zimbabawe a thought. Sure, I skimmed over the article that was sent out before her talk but that is as far as I had thought. Zimbabawe was just another country in Africa, I have a tendency to focus on my own life more so. But I had no idea about their political system. i had  heard about their one million dollar bills but that’s pretty much it. I found her talk to be very interesting when she spoke about how their President had been in power for so long and when the previous elections took place, he had to cheat in order to keep his position. And the people that were found out to be involved with the election against him were hunted and basically prosecuted in some way for trying to actually use their right to vote. It just makes me think of how lucky I am to live in a country that people are actually able express themselves to a degree.