Iquitos, Peru: We're all working hard to pay the bills, feed the kids, and build the life and world of our dreams. This ordinary couple work night and day, but they share long-lasting chemistry and humor that keep the daily grind full of... possibilities.

Shivanandan with his wife (behind and R) and children.

38-year-old Shivanandan Tanti, from Lodhipur village in Bihar, India, appeared for most of his life to be an ordinary poor man. The only job he could find was weaving tussar silk on an...

"Breaking bread is so symbolic, all around the world. We're going to have fun in this class and offer one new choice each day." -- Chef Anthony Head, "The People's Chef"

One in four children in the U.S. lives in poverty and...

The United Nations has designated December 3 International Day for Persons With Disabilities.
This year's theme: removing barriers to create an inclusive and accessible society for all.
According to the World Health Organization, 1 billion people (that's 1 in 7, or 15 percent)...

Corporate sponsors will pay The School Fund 19 cents (one class hour), every time viewers watch the new music video of "Free Your Mind" by Grammy-nominated indie-jazz musician Carolyn Malachi. The money goes directly to schools in Tanzania. You can be the first to...

Lucknow, India: Thanks to his father's constant job transfers, Lokesh Kumar Singh grew up moving around Uttar Pradesh, a state considered one of the most deeply impoverished in India. Here, roughly a quarter of the population is considered "

Grammy-nominated indie-jazz singer Carolyn Malachi teams up with The School Fund to keep students in school with the power of music.

"Wherever you are, your mind put you there. Free your mind." -- Carolyn Malachi

Washington,...

A Mother and her daughter's values clash in rural northern India. Is this what happens to teenagers everywhere, or does living in extreme poverty exacerbate these issues?

"A proper life is to get married, go to the farm and work and then...

Julienne was just four during the 1994 genocide. She is HIV-positive and works as an artisan for this member-owned women's collective through The Ihangane Project. Ihangane brought solar lighting to the health clinic where she gave birth safely without...

Laily Begum felt lucky to receive a $75 microloan for a sewing machine to launch her tailoring business. With the machine, she could produce a salwar kameez (tunic and pants) in just 2.5 hours. She found a corner in her one-room brick house in a village near Kolkata, India, that...

The world reverberates with crashing economies and toppling dictatorships from Detroit to Italy, Egypt to Syria; and one vital outcome of these changes is this: Everyday people know more about one another, feel connected through communication, and take action in the collective. The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street have...

As American children return to school, 70 million children in developing countries cannot go. Modest school fees keep them blocked from education, job opportunity and earning potential. This summer I traveled with The School Fund, an all-volunteer team using breakthrough technology via their website to send kids to...

Bacho, Tanzania - It's a typical story: Americans go to Africa for safari. They find that the television images of big-eyed children with protruding ribs, crusted with dirt and biting flies, are real. Then they see there is a lot more to the story, that the people are real too.

Could there be another reason beside constant craving for publicity, for both giant philanthropists as well as us small givers? Just maybe, intention has more impact than zeros.

Carlos Slim just found himself on the short list of the world's biggest philanthropists. The richest man on the planet...

Egypt and Jordan -- The 2011 Arab Revolution reaches back for decades in long-term economic inequity and political tyranny, but what lit the current powder keg is simple human connection, made possible by multisource news and social media. After police pulled businessman Khaled Said out of an internet café last...

The mess we made with our wealth

We spend and borrow, ignoring tomorrow. Somehow, that became the American way. We max out credit cards and take out new loans to pay off old ones. And three years into the worst economic crisis the U.S. has seen in a century,...

The World Cup: Kenya's former king of thugs may just play in the next one.

John the General was not that tall, for a murderer. I expected someone who loomed menacing and mean. He was deeply feared in Nairobi, Kenya. They called him "The General" because he had worked his...

We've just endured the worst financial crisis in a century, while microloans to the poor have held steady as the world's most viable lending investment with a 98% repayment rate. Still, microfinance has gotten so much bad press lately, for corruption from within (field officers or government workers skimming profits)...

When those already afflicted by centuries of racism and poverty suffer a natural disaster such as the January 12 Haiti earthquake, we in the United States sit up and take notice as the news coverage runs 24/7 in the immediate aftermath.

We have become far more aware...