CARE Senior Director of Partnerships and Alliances Joan Garvey Lundgren speaks on the topic of women and children in the developing world during an event sponsored by the Raven Foundation and First Congregational Church of Wilmette at Ten Thousand Villages in Evanston.

Joan shares stories from her experiences working at CARE – from visiting girls in Guatemala who are the first in their families to go to secondary school to meeting women in West Africa who are finding solutions to chronic hunger through new businesses. Through these stories, she discusses CARE’s strategy of working with women and girls to address the root causes of poverty in three critical ways: ensuring safe pregnancy and birth, providing education and leadership opportunities for girls, and supporting access to financial services for women. Joan also talks about how families in the United States can get involved in efforts to eradicate global poverty.

In preparation for this event, Raven Foundation Founder Suzanne Ross interviewed Joan Lundgren at the CARE offices in Chicago. Listen in.

View the two videos Lundgren references in her talk, The Girl Effect and I am Powerful, on CARE’s website.

Joan Garvey Lundgren is a Senior Director with CARE’s Strategic Partnerships and Alliances unit. In this role she leads relationships with many of CARE’s top corporate partners, which includes managing corporate giving, cause-related marketing alliances, and engagement around business and policy issues that impact the communities CARE serves. Prior to joining CARE, Joan specialized in fundraising campaigns, grant writing, and managing special projects for community-based organizations in Chicago. While at the Cambodian Association of Illinois, she helped establish the Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, the first of its kind in the United States. Joan also spent time in Rajasthan, India, working on an HIV/AIDS awareness initiative and with women’s micro-enterprise programs. Joan is a Chicago native and holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a BA in International Business from the George Washington University.

Suzanne Ross is the author of two books – The Wicked Truth: When Good People Do Bad Things and The Wicked Truth About Love: The Tangles of Desire. In 2007, Ross co-founded the Raven Foundation with husband Keith. Based on the principles of mimetic theory, the foundation seeks to make religion reasonable, violence unthinkable and peace a possibility by challenging conventional wisdom and opening the door to new reasoning. Suzanne is a graduate of Bucknell University and a certified Montessori educator. She has extensive experience as a corporate training consultant, and is a former editor of the literary journal, StoryQuarterly. She is the former Director of Christian Education for a United Church of Christ congregation. As a member of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion, she has attended and presented at the annual conferences. Suzanne is a member of the Education Committee of Imitatio, Inc. She lives, works and plays golf with her husband Keith in Glenview, Illinois.

Recorded Sunday, January 31, 2010 at Ten Thousand Villages - Evanston.