Vantage Points
Addressing Food Insecurity: A Community Approach
Lauren Shweder Biel is Executive Director and co-founder of DC Greens. She has served as co-chair of DC Health's "Diabesity" Committee and on the Mayor's Commission for Healthy Youth and Schools. Lauren was named a 2014 Toyota "Mother of Invention," and received a 2019 David Bradt Nonprofit Leadership Award. She is currently an advisor to the Aspen Institute's Food & Society, Food is Medicine working group.
What drove you to create DC Greens, and has any of that vision changed since you started?
My co-founder and I first founded DC Greens in 2009. So, if ...
Addressing the Most Critical Factors Toward Eliminating Diseases of Poverty
Professor Bentwich, a physician, and world-renowned clinical immunologist and AIDS researcher. Since its onset, he became involved in AIDS and AIDS research and led the first AIDS center in Israel. Currently, he is Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheba, where he is also head of the Center for Tropical Diseases and AIDS (CEMTA) and its implementing arm in Africa -NALA Foundation, that is heavily involved in eradicating Neglected Tropical Diseases from Ethiopia and Africa. In the course of the last five years this activity has ...
Urban Farming for Social Impact
Josephine Chu is the Programs and Operations Manager at Common Good City Farm. She manages the distribution of the farm's produce through the Farm Stand and organizes the Seed-to-Table workshops and Community Events. As a graduate from American University's MA program in Global Environmental Politics, she became very involved in DC's food justice work. She co-founded Zenful Bites, a women-of-color owned social enterprise that provides plant-based eco-catering services and food education programming to foster a sustainable and fair food system in the DC metro region.
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Transitioning an Organization from its Local Origin to Support its International Focus: A Board Perspective
Richard A. Poppa (pronounced Poppy) is a Planning Facilitator and Governance Consultant and serves as Manager of RAPt Consulting, LLC. He served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of New York, Inc. for more than 20 years, retiring at the end of 2016 as President Emeritus.
Dick has been involved in numerous professional and civic activities, serving on the Board of Directors of the American Society of Association Executives. Dick was a founding member of the Trustedchoice.com Board of Managers, Past Chair of ...
Empowering the Future of Social Impact
Carrie Rich is the co-founder and CEO of The Global Good Fund, a nonprofit organization that supports high potential social entrepreneurs in more than 25 countries globally, collectively serving 339,000 beneficiaries.
Channeling Women’s Voices Through Digital Multimedia
If you gather people for an event and you show them a short film—you are able to more quickly convince them of your cause, rather than just relying on a speech or a lecture. Short films are a very effective tool to inform people about important topics. Of course, they can also go viral.
Crossing Faiths and Building Bridges
One of the innovations of the podcast is that it doesn't have to be just two people talking. We want to make sure that we have a space that is participatory, not just from a listening perspective, garnering support from different communities—but making sure that they see it as space for anyone to come and talk about the issues of the day, and utilize that format in that space.
Building Resiliency Around the World
VantagePoints shares the impactful work of thought leaders around the world who are making a social impact. We understand that many of us have started to feel frustrated, bored, and restless during these times. That’s why we have picked out three of our articles that continue to inspire us and leave us hopeful for a kinder, more positive global society.
Impact:Peace is Reducing Violence Through High Impact Peacebuilding
People think about lethality and they think about conflict zones. They don't think about countries and places with very high levels of violence that exist outside of conflict. For example, many people don't realize that Brazil and Mexico constitute two of the most lethal countries in the world. If we're going to be talking about evidence-based solutions to address violence, we have to start with knowing—where is the violence, and what's the kind of violence that we're talking about?
Beyond Mobility: Wheelchairs Enable Engagement and Quality of Life in Developing Regions
When I started coming to Belize and Guatemala 1980, I saw people with disabilities that were crawling around on the ground or stuck in bed. That kind of tore my heart out. Just prior to returning to the States from Guatemala in the summer of 1988, I saw a woman, for the second time, crawling across the Pan-American Highway.
