Tia is holding a volunteer event on Saturday, March 26th from 8:30 a.m. till 12:30 p.m. at the Thunderbird campus.  If you’d like to join us, please come with your laptop and meet us at the FISH, adjacent to the swimming pool.  Click here for a campus map with the FISH circled in red.  The Thunderbird campus is located on the corner of 59th Avenue and Greenway in Glendale, Arizona.

The event is being hosted by ThunderCares, an organization within Thunderbird dedicated to community service. ThunderCares will be providing breakfast, facilitation and  10-15 volunteers to Tia as well as volunteers for other community service projects.

Join us for a fun volunteer experience and make some new friends!  And remember, bring your laptop!

So many of our friends have written to ask about the progress we have made in Secretary Clinton’s Innovation award.  Here is the latest: the Tia Foundation is thrilled to be named one of 5 organizations being considered for the Secretary’s Innovation Award for the Empowerment of Women and Girls.  We just received the news today that our full proposal has made it to Innovation Jury Selection Round!  Two organizations will be selected in this round to receive an award of up to $500,000!  We are very grateful to our staff, interns and volunteers who helped us prepare  and edit the full proposal and due diligence reporting.

Continue reading “Hurray! Tia Makes Final Jury Selection Round!”

The Tia Foundation believes strongly in sound data gathering practices.  We conduct a baseline data study, surveying 25% of the households in our villages prior to project implementation.  The comprehensive survey reports on health histories, hygiene habits, living conditions, diet, education, immigration, and many other factors.  After a project is complete, we do follow up studies at 3 months, 6 months and then annually thereafter.

We use this data to customize our curriculum and medical kits, to constantly improve our model and methodology, and hopefully soon to share this data with other organizations and governments to use to help alleviate poverty and improve health.  With the help of Eclaire, a technology NPO aimed at helping charitable organizations share data, Tia will have the ability to have a web-based portal for dissemination of our research data, while maintaining villagers’ privacy.

Continue reading “Great Research Data Worth Sharing”

The Economist ran an article on December 16, 2010 called “Field of Tears” which is well worth quoting here because it echos what we hear regularly in the field.  The piece opens with Teresa Vega and her family in the aftermath of flooding near her home.  Her son becomes ill with dysentery, but the nearest doctor was a few hours away and they had no money to pay him.  “They could do nothing, she says. They watched their son die.”

“Ms Vega now says this event is the reason for everything she and her husband have done since.”  Their home offered no jobs and she did not want to lose another child.  The family headed north for the United States and after being caught three times by la migra, they finally succeeded in crossing the border.

Back in 2006, Laura Libman accompanied a group of Thunderbird School of Global Management‘s graduate students to conduct a study on cross border immigration.  The qualitative responses from the villagers interviewed, echo also the words of John Steinbeck’s observance about the Joad family and the other Okies, “How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare him—he has known a fear beyond every other.”