Are you interested in giving gifts with low environmental impacts? Do you have friends and family who are trying to downsize? Want to help make the holidays more sustainable? There are many creative approaches to giving meaningful gifts that also make a difference.  Below are a few suggestions.

• #GivingTuesday – make a donation to your loved one’s favorite charity in their name and let them know in a holiday card. To make a holiday gift of education with an Engage Globally donation, click here.
• Shop at alternative gift fairs – if you’re in the DC area, please join us Dec. 1st at the Takoma Park Fair.
• Gift opportunities to #OptOutside – give an annual pass to local, state or national parks.
• Gift an activity that you can do together, such as tickets to a museum, arts program, or show.
• Need a gift for a child? Sponsor an endangered species and give a small stuffed animal. Two of our favorite sponsor an animal opportunities are World Wildlife Fund and the Smithsonian National Zoo.
• Need a gift for a teen? – try giving shoes or clothes made of recycled plastic or an ocean plastic bracelet from 4Ocean. Each bracelet purchased funds pick-up of 20 pounds of plastic.
• Make personal gifts such as cooking a meal, printing favorite photos from the year, and planting native plants together. 

Please share your other favorite sustainable gift ideas below or send suggestions to engage@engageglobally.org. 
​Happy Holidays! 

Food:

• When possible, purchase from local restaurants and caterers with environmental certifications.  
• If catering, ask the caterer not to use plastic or Styrofoam packaging.
• If preparing meals, source as much as possible locally and organically.
• Try to reduce use of meat and offer vegetarian and vegan choices. 
• If serving seafood, use the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch app to assess sustainability.
  
• Try to avoid all singly wrapped items - such as bags of chips or wrapped cookies.
• Label foods to help guests choose and to visually illustrate your sustainability efforts. 
• Have a plan for using and sharing leftover food. 
  
  • Have a friend who can compost? Ask them to take home food scraps. 
    
  • Have friends with pets? Ask them if they would like a doggie 'bag'. 

Drinks:

• Provide containers of tap water or access to tap water.
• If possible, avoid offering any drinks in plastic bottles. 
• Ask participants to bring their reusable water bottles and coffee mugs in your invitation.
• If serving coffee, use containers of cream and sugar. Try to avoid all single-use supplies. 
• If serving coffee, buy from companies that are fair trade and environmentally friendly, such as those that are Rainforest Alliance certified. 

Supplies:

• Use reusable kitchenware.
• Strive to avoid using plastic, whenever possible. 
• If other forks, knives, and spoons are needed, use compostable products. 
• Use cold cups made from plants that are 100% compostable (such as Greenware). 
• Use hot cups that are compostable (avoid all Styrofoam).
• Provide napkins and plates that are 100% recycled paper and compostable.  

Gifts:

• If providing gifts to a large group, consider items that can be regularly used to reduce environmental impacts. These include: reusable grocery bags; reusable water bottles; reusable hot drink mugs; and t-shirts made from recycled plastic. 
• Consider a digital 'goodie bag' - coupons, free items, cards, tickets, etc.
• For smaller events and personal gifts, consider giving activities, such as tickets to events or annual passes to local museums. 
• Instead of purchasing decorations, use small potted plants and then give them to guests.  

Please send additional suggestions to engage@engageglobally.org. 

Today, my colleague Kaila Drayton and I, are traveling to Ghana to visit our partner communities. We are especially excited to leave on International Women’s Day because much of our work involves expanding opportunities for girls and women. Sustainable Development Goal 5, is about achieving gender equality, which remains a challenge in much of the world. For example, in the region of Ghana where we work, only about 2.3% of women complete secondary school (UNICEF 2012).
 
We know that investing in opportunities for women, especially in education, has many broad benefits for development. These include:

• Women spend a high percentage of their income on their families, especially on health, education, food, and housing. This multiplier effect creates high levels of return on investment.
• Educating women farmers and providing them with resources significantly increases food production.
• Educated girls are more likely to postpone having children and to wait longer between pregnancies, which generally improves child health and nutrition, as well as raising family incomes. For example, a World Bank study found that in Ghana women with a high school education had on average 2.5 children, while those without had on average six children.
• Educated girls are less likely to marry before they are 18. A study by the UNFPA of 78 developing nations found that girls who never attended school were three times more likely to marry before 18 than girls who go to school.
• When more girls attend school, national incomes and gross domestic products rise.
• Providing clean water and cook stoves to women, increases girls’ education and also reduces local environmental degradation for many communities.

In Ghana, Engage Globally supports women’s equality in several ways, including:

• Early-childhood education for girls
• Scholarships and bicycles for girls to middle and high school
• Vocational training for young women who were not able to attend school and grants to vocational graduates to open their own small businesses
• Adult literacy and health classes for women
• Funding to hire women as staff in our partner organizations, including hiring mothers as cooks for both of our early childhood centers.  

We hope you will join us in celebrating International Women's Day and supporting educational and economic opportunities for women! 

On March 8th, two Engage board members will travel to Northern Ghana to visit our partner communities. We are very excited about this opportunity to visit the early childhood centers and to meet with students receiving educational scholarships. As part of this trip, professional photographer, Kaila Drayton, will be teaching photography skills to youth, teachers, and staff to enhance the capacity of our partners to document their programs.
 
Sharing local voices, empowering youth to tell their own stories, and documenting environmental conservation are priorities for Engage. You can learn more about our trip by reading our blogs, by following us on Facebook and on the photography project site.
 
Before our trip, we are working to collect school supplies and other items to deliver to our local partners. You can help by donating any product on our Amazon Wish List and by sharing our posts on Facebook. If you know of any community groups, businesses, or others who might like to make a donation, please let us know.
 
We look forward to sharing our trip and community programs with you this March. 

By Kaila Drayton Ferrufino
 
I attended Bridgewater College, a small school located in a rural Virginia town. As a liberal arts college, they required students to take a handful of elective courses. These classes were often outside of one’s field of study and were meant to help students become well-rounded individuals. I was suffering from a very strong case of senior-itis and didn’t care what elective I took as long as it fulfilled my requirement and got me to graduation. So I closed my eyes and picked one. African Politics. Sounds great. Sign me up.
 
As it turns out, I did well in the class and enjoyed my professor’s lectures and my fellow classmates. I knew the professor was planning on taking a handful of student to Niger in Western Africa after graduation, but I had no money and no plans to join them. On one of the last days of class, the professor set the itinerary on my desk and said “You’re going. Figure something out.” So I figured something out and I went.
 
While in Niger, we went to visit a Bridgewater College alum who had joined the Peace Corps and was volunteering in a rural community outside of Maradi. We went to her community, traveling over one single stretch of dusty road for what felt like hours, dodging potholes and goats along the way. The entire community greeted us when we arrived. We stopped at the school and dropped off basic school supplies and then we walked around with the children. We handed out disposable cameras so the children could take their own pictures. I remember being stunned when we developed the film and got to see the community through their eyes and their perspective. Later, we escaped from the brutal mid-day sun by sitting with a group of girls in a thatch-roofed hut. They were painting henna on my hands. One of the girls wore a bubblegum pink headwrap with matching plastic earrings and a traditional dress. I pointed at myself and said “Kaila”. She pointed at herself and said “Lasara”. She drew what looked like a fern, starting at the heel of my palm and climbing up my thumb. We didn’t speak each other’s language but we were still able to gesture in some rudimentary form of communication. I remember thinking she was very intelligent and that she was good at leading the other children and helping me communicate what I wanted them to do. When we were getting ready to leave, Lasara tapped my arm. She pointed at my camera and then pointed at herself. I took her portrait in the hut where she gave me my henna tattoo.
 
On the ride home, I learned that 12 year-old Lasara was to be married the following week. She would become the fourth wife to man in his 60’s. That was my ah-ha moment. The moment when I knew I wanted to use my photography to be a voice for those who don’t have one. I followed that moment into the Peace Corps, into being a board member for Engage Globally, and into using my photography as a way to share other peoples’ stories.
 
To learn more about our current project focused on empowering youth to tell their stories visit: https://envirophoto.weebly.com
​

​As a professor of sustainable development, I have been very lucky to have the opportunity to travel with my students to several countries. When I was planning our first trip to Ghana, I was advised that pens were a good gift to bring to the schools we would be visiting. When we arrived at our first rural school, which was closed for a holiday, we found that over a hundred children had lined up in the hopes of getting a pen. Turns out, there weren’t any pens or pencils at their school. There also wasn’t any paper, water, chalk, electricity, books, or toilets. A few days later, we visited a small women’s program. And, kids from a nearby school, seeing our bus, came over and once again stood in line. After we distributed the last of our pens, I was waiting outside when a little girl came running up. She was about 8 and she didn’t have a school uniform or shoes. She stopped and looked shyly up at me. When I smiled, she came closer and I saw that she was carrying a very rusty pencil box with a faded cover of Minnie Mouse on it. She opened it up to show me her treasures – a Ghanaian penny, a broken pencil, and a button. I found a pen in my bag and gave it to her. She took it, smiled this huge smile, carefully put it in her treasure box and started running as fast as she could towards home.
 
At that moment, as I put on my sunglasses to hide my tears, I knew that I had to do more. That same trip, we met a wonderful community leader working in a group of nearby villages, who had a long-term plan for his communities’ development. I believe that sustainable development is best achieved by local people managing their own projects to achieve their goals. During our next two trips, my students and I began to support the communities’ efforts and two years later, with a lot of help, I started Engage Globally.
 
For me, this is an exciting opportunity to make a difference, to learn new skills, to challenge myself, and to work with other people who are active and passionate. It is also tough, partially because there are parts of this I’m not very good at, but mostly because it is just not enough. Sometimes I'll be looking for something in my purse and I will see the five or six pens I’ve left at the bottom, and I think of that little girl and all the children like her, with beautiful smiles and endless potential, but without a pen…

Since the Millennium Development Goals of 2000, we have seen remarkable achievements in raising life expectancies, addressing global health crises, and reducing poverty worldwide. However, sometimes international aid is not as effective as we might wish with projects designed based on the donors’ priorities and timeline rather than the local community’s needs.   
 
When I first visited Ghana, I saw some of these ‘donor-driven’ outcomes. A well-constructed library building that has been locked and empty, for four years, because no operational funds were provided. Another library with hundreds of donated books, all in German. Broken solar panels on schools, businesses, and wells that were damaged by wind, rains and dust. Without any repair funds or local training, the solar projects simply remain broken. Water purification projects that clog, break, or run dry.  Recycling bins and ‘how to recycle’ murals made by international volunteers in a region where there is no recycling. In some small villages, you can find many of these projects, all with donor dedication signs, and all in varied states of disrepair and decay. This has a variety of unintended psychological impacts on communities that must look at these broken efforts every day, while their real needs go unmet.
 
Engage Globally uses a different model of development, referred to as ‘community-led’. In this model, local communities and community leaders meet and discuss their priorities and design plans for meeting their sustainable development goals. Outside partners provide the resources to enable local communities to implement their plans. These resources are generally a combination of funding and some capacity building, training, or technical assistance.

​Local leadership and management of projects has many advantages including:

• Local Knowledge – Outsiders often do not understand important cultural, economic, and environmental contexts. Last year, we asked our partners if they could pilot a tree planting project to teach youth about environmental conservation. When we received photos, we saw that the students had carefully constructed fences around each tree. When we proposed the project, it had not occurred to us that the trees would need to be protected from roving goats. But, community members realized the trees could not survive without protection and trained everyone in fence design before planting.

• Flexibility – sometimes projects don’t work. Community-led projects can be rapidly evaluated and adjusted to improve outcomes or, in some cases, to change direction. This is a sharp contrast from most international aid which is a designated sum of money to be used for a designated time period.
• Empowerment – local project implementers learn new skills, achieve significant results and in general are personally and collectively empowered by leading their communities. This has positive impacts on gender equity, community building, civic engagement, and hopeful outlooks. Rather than waiting for outsiders to address problems or fix broken projects, the community is empowered to take care of things themselves.

Though community-led development may be small scale and last a long time, at Engage Globally we believe that it is the most effective way to have long-term, sustainable and transformational development.