By Fiona Flanagan;
Mosaic Staff Writer-
Media Credit: MCT Campus
Christmas seems to be coming sooner and sooner with every passing year. The two month long “holiday” season consists of constant reminders of just how material- obsessed modern day society is. Television is littered with advertisements appealing to children, describing to them exactly what they “need” for the upcoming holiday.Despite this, there are many people out there thinking about those in need. It’s hard to find a grocery store this time of year without a person sitting in front ringing a bell collecting money for Salvation Army. There are toy drives at schools and businesses and huge influx of volunteers who want to work at soup kitchens and homeless shelters.Of course, these are all wonderful examples of how willing people are to help those who are less fortunate—yet often times these efforts persist only until the season of “giving” is over.
Karen Tramontano, however, is a woman who helps those struggling with poverty all throughout the year, beyond the holiday season.
On November 8, Karen Tramontano came to Salve Regina University to discuss the Global Fairness Initiative, an organization developed to help the working poor take part in globalization in a more positive, sustainable and equitable way. The event took place in the Distefano Lecture Hall and was co-sponsored by the Office of International Programs and the deans of arts and sciences and graduate and professional studies.
One year after serving as the Deputy Chief of Staff to President Clinton from 1997 until 2001, Tramontano began the Global Fairness initiative. For the past ten years, Tramontano and the rest of the organization have worked to help improve the lives of thousands of Latin Americans.
Her plan is simple enough; help those working in the informal sector (the untaxed part of an economy) transition into the formal sector (the taxed part of an economy that guarantees many benefits). At present, the Global Fairness Initiative is studying and attempting to transition groups of people from the informal to the formal sector in fifteen different countries. This idea at first may seem very complex, but in reality it’s very simple.
One example Tramontano described at length depicted a group of women working to cultivate cocoa crops. These women work in the informal sector with no benefits or connections to large corporations. They are stuck in poverty with no system to help them escape. Once their children turn seven they begin to work in the informal sector and get caught in the vicious cycle of inescapable poverty. The Global Fairness Initiative swooped in to slowly help these women find their way into the formal sector to get various benefits from guaranteed minimum wage to access to public roads and storage facilities.
Naturally this system is much more complex than previously described, but the idea of the organization is to help all people around the world stuck in poverty to figure out a way to break away from it.
Rather than donating a few dollars to the man ringing the bell at the grocery store for the short couple months that he is there, people should consider extending your charity to year round. The huge organizations cannot work their magic alone, they need charitable people to act as catalysts to end world poverty in the smallest places.
