Economic Growth

Strengthen ND in the U.S. will encourage North Dakotans experiencing poverty to take up the rich local tradition of homesteading by using stories to connect the diverse populations of new residents and longtime rural residents. Homesteading was the original mode of economic mobility for European migrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. The recent energy boom brought in more families from around the world, including from refugee camps, creating a more diverse population not fully sufficient in terms of opportunities for economic growth.

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, together with visual artist and educator Zun Lee, M.D., and the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition in the U.S. will tell the stories of traumatic loss, resilience, and quests for economic mobility of young black men in Baltimore to recast them in the national consciousness as human beings deserving of dignity and investment rather than as social problems. In the last decade, the team has documented the unequal burdens of violence and grief faced by this community.

White Mountain Apache tribal members and founders of the Arrowhead Business Group Foundation in the U.S. will engage the voices of their fellow Native Americans to tell the story of a grass roots initiative to change the national narrative about the poorest and most invisible peoples in the U.S. Native Americans living in reservation settings continue to struggle with poverty and high unemployment. Working together with their tribe and the Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health, they will use different forms of media to explain how the first peoples of the U.S.

Brandeis University and Boston University in the U.S. will gather and disseminate the life histories of people who have suffered economic decline to highlight the dynamic nature of the underlying causes and better inspire empathy. Economic and social decline often lurches in fits and starts over a lifetime, driven by diverse, interrelated factors such as family resources and relationships. However, most studies on social mobility focus on a specific moment in time.

The Children's Defense Fund in the U.S. will tell the stories of young people from diverse backgrounds living in poverty and combine them with policy solutions to prompt audiences to help lift families out of poverty. Children are often missing from the poverty debate, yet a child who had no say in their own circumstances may be better able to overcome the prejudices surrounding adults living in poverty. They will identify young people who have experienced elements of poverty, such as food insufficiency or homelessness, and capture their stories on film.

One of the most severe form of malnutrition, acute malnutrition remains a significant problem throughout the developing world. The Community-based management of acute malnutrition (CMAM) approach attempts to address acute malnutrition in scale by reducing the cost of treatment and at the same time maximizing coverage through community engagement. But this is not enough. It is necessary to provide tools so that the community has a more active role in solving the problem.

Hira Zainab of Knowledge Platform Limited in Pakistan will develop a 'Birds and Bees' program to enable teachers and students from underprivileged schools in Islamabad, Pakistan to design and build bird feeders and bee colonies in order to nurture birds and bees and to market honey. Pakistan is home to over 700 species of birds and fauna that can support substantially increased national honey production. They will recruit pilot schools and work together with the teachers and students to research the local bird species in order to design effective bird feeders.