Types of Education and Awareness Events

What is the purpose of your event?

Education One of the most critical goals of Whole Planet Foundation’s Student Outreach Program is to educate students and empower them to make pro-poor decisions throughout their lives and give them the tools necessary to make a tangible impact toward alleviating poverty worldwide.

This is a very powerful message to relay, and events aimed at education are a great way to help students realize that they can, in fact, make change starting right now. If the goal of your event is education, there are a few resources that can have a lasting effect on young adults on your campus:

 Host a screening featuring one of these compelling documentaries of organizations that support Whole Planet Foundation:

o Living On One—www.livingonone.org and also available on iTunes

o Bonsai People—www.bonsaimovie.com

o To Catch a Dollar—www.tocatchadollar.com

 Arrange for a Whole Planet Foundation Team Member or Whole Foods Market Team Member Volunteer to speak about their experiences with microcredit clients across the world to:

o Your student organization o At your event

o Your classroom o Anywhere through Skype

 Plan a trivia night with rounds dedicated to microfinance, entrepreneurship, Whole Planet Foundation, poverty, cultures across the world, etc.

Awareness Alongside education, awareness is a crucial component of this engagement initiative. Awareness may not equip people with hard facts that they can then relay to others, but events purely aimed at awareness can definitely ignite a person to seek out further information on poverty alleviation and microcredit.

The best way to achieve mass awareness is to create some sort of display, showcase or video along with the use of guerilla marketing.

There are many creative ways to carry out an awareness effort and some may work better on your specific campus. Here are a few ideas to get the ball rolling:  Make posters with pictures of commonly purchased items that cost about $1.25 (a cup of coffee, a pack of gum, a bottle of water, etc) to illustrate that there are 1.1 billion people in the world living on less than $1.25 a day

 Create a large plywood board with a question like “if you had $175 dollars, what business would you start?”, “what would you do with $175?”, “what do you wish for your children” or “what are you most proud of” and invite people to share their thoughts on the board alongside quotes from microcredit clients answering similar questions

 Chalk the streets on and near campus with #GPA or Raise Your GPA in large letters with vibrant colors to create buzz and allure around the program and raising your global poverty awareness

Contributions Although this outreach campaign is not aimed at fundraising, it is very empowering to raise a small amount of money as a group that can fund one entrepreneur’s microloan. The amazing thing about microcredit is that if someone donates $1.75 from spare change in their pocket, that is 1/100 of a microloan that can significantly change a person’s life and the lives of their children.

It is also important to emphasize that 100% of contributions go directly to microcredit clients because Whole Foods Market covers all administrative costs for Whole Planet Foundation.

Here are a few fundraising ideas where a little change can make a big change:

 Build a makeshift “wishing well” to be used during tabling efforts or as part of your event and have people throw their spare change into it

 Start a penny war between student housing floors, student organizations, college departments or local campus restaurants/hangouts to encourage people to make a contribution to help an entrepreneur

Organization Partnership One of the easiest ways to create a presence on your campus is to partner with other student organizations. This is a smart way to reach an audience that you may have missed otherwise. It also builds relationships that can be beneficial to you when planning your own events in the future.

Do a quick search through the student organizations on your campus. Many schools make this very easy by having an online database of organizations that you can browse through. Use keywords like ‘global’, ‘poverty’, ‘social entrepreneurship’ and ‘microfinance’ to start. It may also be helpful to search for organizations that focus on a particular culture of a country where Whole Planet Foundation works.

Once you find a group that is interested in partnering with you, figure out what it is that you will be able to do at their event, what you will provide them and what they will provide you. Sometimes it is as simple as being able to come to their event and pass out information, speaking at one of their meetings, a mention on their social media or getting the Whole Planet Foundation logo on their event material.

The possibilities are endless, so build those connections and meet other fantastic people doing amazing work in the world!