Announcing 'Miles 4 MDGs'

Hi all,
This is a message to officially announce a new blog: http://m4mdg.blogspot.com/

While on a recent Saturday long run, I've decided to dedicate my first marathon to the Millennium Villages Project. I'll be running the National Marathon in Washington DC on March 21st. Any and all donations I gather in the meantime (which I don't expect to be much, but anything will help!) I'll donate to the MVP.

So, I launched this blog to accompany my goal. It's not much yet, but I hope to raise a little bit of support for the Millennium Villages Project and for MVP-like projects (One.org, UNICEF, etc), and more importantly, to show that average people can make a difference. Lots of people run marathons, lots of people ride bikes, lots of people go hiking, skiing, canoeing, lots of people do lots of things... why not dedicate it to ending poverty?

We are the first generation that can end poverty, extreme poverty, across the entire world. Extreme poverty - defined as living on less than $1 a day. Over 1 billion people, 1 in 6 people in the world, live on this much every day. I've been lucky enough to meet some of them in the course of my job, to hear their hopes and dreams, to see their kids playing and crying and daydreaming just like any other kids anywhere else in the world.

We can help them... but better yet, we can help them help themselves work their way out of poverty. It's almost impossible to pull yourself out of poverty.... just like it's almost impossible to run a marathon by yourself - with no support and no training. We need debt forgiveness for poor countries, new technologies to fight hunger and disease, restructuring of global trade, and to follow through with our aid promises.

We can do it, and together we can make the world a better place.