WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

Coming off a successful 2013 Global Activism Expo, we visit with one of this year’s attendees. Elke Kroeger-Radcliffe, founder and director of Tikondane, a “community uplift organization” based in Katete, Zambia, tells us about her latest projects and the people involved with her work.

Brutal war has engulfed villages and cities in Mali. Violence in Colombia has forced people out of their homes and left anger, fear and poverty in its wake. Does post-apartheid South Africa offer a vision and a model for war-torn societies? Many countries that have been torn apart by civil war ask: how do we rebuild, how can we make amends, or does accountability trump reconciliation?

Bright Hope International helps faith communities provide aid and assistance to the extreme poor in some of the world’s most devastated countries. The group works in areas such as crisis response, orphan relief, and recently started a program to rescue girls from the sex trade in northern India. We’ll talk with Bright Hope's CEO and president, C.H. Dyer.

Reese Mugerditchian heard Father Jamels James on Global Activism, in 2010, talk about his group, Leading India's Future Today (LIFT). After hearing and attending the Global Activism Expo, Reese was so inspired that she decided to volunteer with the group. Since then, she's been to India several times to work for LIFT. Mugerditchian and Dan Quinn, director of Operations for LIFT USA, are back from recent India trips to tell us what they did. 

As the planet gets smaller - at least in terms of the non-stop flow of information about the seven billion or so inhabitants - our anxiety grows.  As the world feels smaller, so do we.  It is more difficult to see how individual contributions help those in need.

We’ll talk with Wauconda couple, Steve and Paulie Kutschat. They have a deep love for books. After a trip to Africa, the Kutschat’s founded Bookfriends International, a nonprofit providing educational resources to secondary school-age children in Africa. Bookfriends gives the children text books, library books and reference materials that are in desperately short supply in their local villages.