Beneficiary guest blog: APOPO— Training Rats to Save Lives

APOPO is a global non-profit with Belgian roots, that researches, develops, and implements scent detection technology to solve global humanitarian issues. For over 20 years APOPO’s scent detection rats, nicknamed HeroRATs, have been detecting landmines and tuberculosis in affected countries around the world. The rats are trained through clicker/reward methods, receiving tasty food treats when…

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APOPO

APOPO is an innovative organization that uses trained detection HeroRATs to tackle a surprising combination of humanitarian challenges. Their approach to using these rats for landmine and tuberculosis detection is based on scientific research and their methods are well documented for easy replication. APOPO’smethods are innovative, interesting, and ground-breaking. Tackling such diverse problems as health…

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APOPO uses FBB donations to save lives

APOPOAPOPO was our Human Rights beneficiary for the fourth quarter of 2013. Development Manager Chris Hines shared this report on how APOPO will use the grant they received from FBB. FBB members donated $10,700 to APOPO last quarter.

Dear Foundation Beyond Belief Supporters,

Thank you for your generous donations to APOPO through Foundation Beyond Belief. Due to your generosity, Foundation Beyond Belief supporters raised $10,700 for APOPO and the HeroRATs! We believe that the sum of our efforts is truly magnified by the valuable contributions of people like you. 

Your support will be used in Tanzania to train rats to detect landmines, a vital part of APOPO’s operations. The nine-month training program transforms the rats from tiny babies to confident, big, and friendly HeroRATs. For more information, see our training program infograph. We hope you feel like a part of our team and we invite you to share in our successes. 

Our demining teams help return land to local populations, offering villagers safe return to their homesteads and access to vital farmland. To date, our Mozambique Mine Action program has destroyed over 2,900 landmines, released over 8.5 million square meters of mine-free land, and has handed over a mine-free Gaza province to the local communities over one year before the deadline. APOPO Mine Action has also started in Angola in partnership with Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), one of the leading humanitarian mine clearance operators in the country. 

In Tanzania, we continue to address the challenges of screening for the deadly but curable disease tuberculosis (TB). To date, we have discovered over 4,700 TB-positive patients who were initially misdiagnosed by microscopy at local hospitals. This has helped increase the detection rates in partner hospitals by over 30%. To track and treat patients, APOPO recently established a partnership with a Tanzanian organization, MKUTA, which is composed of former TB patients for patient follow-up and support. APOPO has replicated the successful TB program in Maputo, Mozambique. In the program’s first year in 2013, over 500 TB patients have been found by the HeroRATs, along with establishing partnerships with eight local hospitals. 

No need to worry about the HeroRATs—they are in no danger since they are too light to set off the landmines and we deactivate the tuberculosis samples before presenting them to the rats. Animal welfare is a top priority at APOPO and we make sure to pamper our rats so they can work hard to save lives! 

Remaining true to our core values of innovation, social transformation, quality, and diversity, APOPO has 99% of its workforce in developing countries and 95% are hired from local communities. This significantly contributes to the economic development of the areas where APOPO maintains operations.

Your support helps APOPO to continue with our lifesaving efforts and we are truly grateful that you share our vision to help solve some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian challenges. Together, we are saving lives and limbs.

Warm regards,

Chris Hines on behalf of the HeroRAT team
Development Manager, APOPO vzw

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APOPO

Apopo is an innovative organization that uses trained detection rats to tackle a surprising variety of humanitarian challenges. Their approach to using these rats for landmine and tuberculosis detection is based on scientific research, and their methods are well documented for easy duplication. Apopo’s methods are innovative, interesting, and ground-breaking. Tackling such diverse problems as health issues and landmine…

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Force Beyond Belief

May the 4th be with the our real-life Jedis in the Humanist Action: Ghana, Beyond Belief Network, and Humanist Disaster Recovery! As far as pop culture role models go, Star Wars’ Jedi have a nice bit of humanist wisdom to offer. Space mysticism aside, Yoda and company espouse an ethical code similar to that which…

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Announcing our new quarter two beneficiaries!

April doesn’t just bring showers and tax day. It also brings new Humanist Grants beneficiaries! Each of this quarter’s beneficiaries highly values evidence-driven interventions and includes integrated data collection and evaluation in their program designs. We are proud to support the work they do!

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Top Ten Signs of Spring—FBB Style!

March 20th was officially the first day of spring, and at Foundation Beyond Belief we are welcoming it with open arms! Here are our top ten signs of spring, as represented by some of our Humanist Grants beneficiaries over the years. #10: The Sun is Shining Say goodbye to those gray winter days and hello,…

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Q4 2013 results leave Foundation Beyond Belief and its beneficiaries astounded!

FBB members and our community gave more than $124,000 last quarter to improve the lives of people around the world. Three of our featured charities, Roots and Wings International, Water Ecuador, and Apopo, will receive grants of more than $10,000 each. And your donations to our Humanist Crisis Response fund drive for immediate needs in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan surpassed all of our previous projects, raising $63,000 for Citizens’ Disaster Response Center and Team Rubicon. Many thanks to our members and supporters for making these life-changing grants possible.

Here’s a breakdown of fourth-quarter contributions: 

 

Roots and Wings International Education Encore Beneficiary: Roots and Wings International $11,195

Water Ecuador

Pathfinders Project

Poverty and Health: Co-grantees Water Ecuador and Pathfinders Project ($5,000 to Water Ecuador and $6,065 to cover Pathfinders Project’s  housing, food, travel, and other necessities while they are volunteering with Water Ecuador) $11,065
Apopo Human Rights: Apopo $10,740
Bat Conservation International The Natural World: Bat Conservation International $9,640
Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice Challenge the Gap: Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice $9,025
Foundation Beyond Belief Foundation Beyond Belief $5,955
Humanist Crisis Response

Humanist Crisis Response

Citizens’ Disaster Response Center

Team Rubicon: Operation Seabird

 

$50,000

$13,970

Kiva Small Grant: FBB Kiva Microfinance Initiative (Look for more information in the near future about how we’ll be engaging with Kiva) $2,500
  TOTAL
$124,090

 

Q4 2013 beneficiary grants are distributed during the first quarter of 2014. Click here to learn more about our new slate of beneficiaries for the first quarter of 2014. And if you’re not yet a member of our Humanist Giving program, click here to join.

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Foundation Beyond Belief adapts a fluid approach to beneficiary selection

AJ ChalomBy AJ Chalom, Humanist Giving Program Coordinator

Foundation Beyond Belief launched the Humanist Giving program in 2010. Over time, we have slowly evolved our process of selecting each quarter’s beneficiaries. We take this process very seriously, since the beneficiaries we support, feature, and partner with say as much about Foundation Beyond Belief as our mission statement.

We maintain a large selection of nominated and interesting charities in our charity database (many of which were nominated by members and our community). Each quarter, a list of priority charities is compiled in each of the five beneficiary categories: Poverty and Health, Education, Human Rights, the Natural World, and Challenge the Gap. We also support charities through our Small Grants and the Humanist Crisis Response program.

Criteria that staff and interns concentrate on when vetting are (in no particular order):

  • Religious Affiliation: We make every attempt to ensure that the charity exemplifies the values of compassionate humanism and is not affiliated with any religious organization (except in the case of Challenge the Gap nominees). In the Challenge the Gap category, we search for liberal religious and interfaith organizations that share our values, do not exclude people from their services based on religion, and do not proselytize during their charitable operations.
     
  • Size: Currently, we only consider charities with a yearly budget of no more than $50 million (except for Crisis Response), although we attempt to find meaningful organizations with a mid-sized budget of less than $5 million so that we can make the greatest impact with our donations. In 2013, we supported an organization with a $40,000 yearly budget (Water Ecuador, a Pathfinders Project host and clean water project) and one with a $400 million budget (International Rescue Committee, the beneficiary for our Syrian refugee Humanist Crisis Response drive).
     
  • Efficiency and Quality: We emphasize quality review and scientific data to support the organization’s efforts. We look for a charity that has a strong, external review of their process. We also look at strategic plans, past performance, and internal reviews to help us determine this important quality. We take advantage of multiple websites doing reviews of effectiveness for different programs. Beneficiaries that were particularly strong in this area include Apopo and 350.org.
     
  • Financial Stability: There is new research supporting the concept that having high salary rates among top staff at an organization is an asset for charity selection due to the organization’s ability to attract and keep quality staff in the nonprofit sector. When FBB staff look at an organization’s financial documents, we look at the stability or growth of income, a healthy reserve, and a reasonable approach to professional fundraising, ensuring fundraising expenses are effective to raise money for the organization and do not exceed about 25-30% of the budget maximum.
     
  • United Nations Millennium Development Goals: In 2013, we began to analyze our past beneficiaries in terms of how they support the UN Millennium Development Goals. You can learn more about the UN Millennium Development Goals on our blog. Particularly with organizations working abroad, we try to ensure we are addressing a broad range of these goals in our beneficiaries.
     
  • The Intangibles: Is an organization updating its web presence? Are its projects innovative? Will our members connect with the mission of the beneficiary? We ask these questions particularly while narrowing down finalists in a category.
     
  • Request for Proposal process: New for 2014, we are developing a Request for Proposal (RFP) process, inviting previously vetted organizations to send us a proposal asking for support for a particular program. We have already released the Human Rights and Natural World versions of the RFP. We are using this strategy to pinpoint specific projects that our prospective beneficiaries need extra support to continue, or new initiatives that are not fully funded. We are inviting organizations that have interested our staff, but that we feel we need more information about before we fund them. Our debut RFP beneficiary is the Ali Forney Center, in the Human Rights category.

Along with these research areas, we seriously take into account staff and intern comments to make final recommendations to our Board of the Directors, who in turn approve the final slate of beneficiaries each quarter.

Members, if you’d like to adjust your donation allocation for our new first-quarter slate of beneficiaries, click “Manage Donation” on the right side of the page.

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Our 2013 beneficiaries inspire us to reach new heights

By AJ Chalom, Humanist Giving Program Coordinator

In 2013 we decided to revisit some of our early beneficiaries. As our membership and donations have grown, our grants to beneficiaries have increased almost ten-fold. We also wanted to introduce our newer members to the work of outstanding previous beneficiaries.

Buddhist Global ReliefOur Challenge the Gap Encore, Buddhist Global Relief, concentrates on helping communities that tackle food and hunger issues. BGR uses Buddha’s statements that “hunger is the worst kind of illness” and “the gift of food is the gift of life” as a guide to their hunger relief work.

Innocence Project of Texas is a groundbreaking organization that fights for the wrongly convicted and for the use scientific forensic evidence in trials in Texas. Their model for reforms should be a model for our country.

EcoHealth Alliance made its Encore appearance as our Natural World beneficiary. Their concentration on animal health in tandem with human health makes their approach unlike that of many other Natural World charities. Their work with bats is a great example of that approach.

Roots and Wings International, our Education encore beneficiary, is a small and effective rural education program working with indigenous people in coffee-growing regions of Guatemala.

Staff Picks

While we support all of our beneficiaries with the same enthusiasm, there are always a few organizations that are game-changers against which we measure our future beneficiaries. This year, three organizations fit that bill.

Apopo HeroRATThe Citizens Foundation, an education organization in Pakistan, has created an incredibly efficient system to build not only schools but curriculum, teacher training, and gender equality in communities. They employ almost all women, for positions from cook to teacher. They work with families to encourage the women to work. A van picks up the teachers to take them to work, so that their husbands can be comfortable with the arrangement. At least 50% of their students are female. This organization is funded at least 50% within the country, and was founded by industrialists within Pakistan who wanted to fix a problem. They have found success.

One Acre Fund uses a market-based model and superior farming techniques to teach residents to create productivity and self-sufficiency in their efforts. Once One Acre Fund enters a community, they stay to provide continuing support and to ensure that the program is effective.

Apopo is a human rights charity that is almost unbelievable in its accomplishments. Significant science-based studies were employed before they launched their program. Apopo’s HeroRATs are trained to locate buried landmines. The rats are so light that they don’t set off the landmines, but they signal to their trainer the location of the mine, and it is then diffused and removed. If that was not enough, after a tuberculosis outbreak in an area where Apopo was working, they discovered that with a little training the rats could also identify patients with a high probability of having tuberculosis, much faster than blood tests, therefore allowing for proper isolation and treatment of patients. This is not fiction—it is real. Foundation Beyond Belief has created a kids’ guide to Apopo and their work.

By the Numbers

The First MillionWhile we try to measure our impact in success stories and increased productivity and the ability to help others, and not just in terms of the dollar amounts raised, here are the exciting numbers we achieved in 2013. This year, we have been able to give individual grants of more than $10,000 for the first time. In mid-July, FBB reached $1 million in donations since its inception in 2010 (including donations to our Humanist Giving program, our Humanist Crisis Response drives, our Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Light The Night international team, and donations to FBB itself).

In 2013, FBB’s Humanist Giving and Crisis Response programs distributed approximately $255,000 to 28 deserving organizations. (This includes donations allocated for the fourth quarter of 2012 that were distributed in January 2013.)

Our community’s continued support of FBB allows us to make these life-changing grants. Our year-end drive has raised more than $14,000—thank you! If you would like to contribute, click here.

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