Visit to Warm Blankets

I went to visit the Warm Blankets Foundation on Monday 8/13 and I have to say that Craig Muller rocks. Here's a guy who, when he came to believe that we should "take care of orphans and widows", as the good book says, he took it to heart, and literally started taking care of orphans, by starting a foundation and building orphanages in Cambodia. They now have over 150 orphanages in various parts of the world.

Here's a representative insight into what Warm Blankets does, and the kind of commitment they have to kids, a recent email from Craig that blew my mind (used with permission):

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From: Craig Muller [www.warmblankets.org]
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2007 10:20 AM
To: Todd Kelsey
Subject: RE: monday - Warm Blankets Foundation?

Hettwer might be interested in going to Kenya and Sudan with me next month or so. I may also stop in Cambodia. I’ll be visiting with AIM-Air because they can get me into Sudan by small plane without getting us shot down. (we hope) It will be a great photo opt I suppose. UN Troops have been moving into the area all week. I’ll also be going to Timor in Oct or so because of the fighting there. Lots of UN folks taking up space there as well, but we have six secured homes in the refugee camps there and are building six more. Lots of fighting since Monday there. Our team moved a couple hundred kids to safety during the night .. yesterday.

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Amazing.

Back in the dotcom heyday, Craig started a company called Motivationnet, which merged with MyPoints.com, and that's where I came across him. (MyPoints became my employer during the dotcom rollercoaster years of 1999-2000, after the rollercoaster years with the rock group Sister Soleil.) So he took his money from the IPO/acquisition, and rolled it into orphanages, and I always thought this was cool, the idea of using business to generate money and doing good things with it.

I guess you'd call it something like: "sell to the rich and give to the poor".

Here's Craig in the conference room, sporting a trendy goatee:



So they do things like rescue kids from garbage dumps or child prostitution, like literally go in there, get them out and give them a home, something to eat, education, hope. They help the kids to help themselves, and are doing crazy things like buying tractors and sending them over to help the orphans actually start a business.

Here's a couple of friendly Warm Blankets people:


Today in the midst of a business exchange, someone emailed me and wrote: "I also am personally looking to donate about 10% of the cash I make in random intervals. Right now I have about $100,000 I would like to donate to a good cause, but just not sure what."

So, mind you, I'm in the middle of struggling to figure out how I'm going to fund my PhD research, and start a non-profit organization, and create free learning material in different languages, which I think are all very good causes. But instead of mentioning this to the exclusion of all else, I wrote this sentence, among others:

"If I had a million dollars of profit a year personally, I might put 5% into opportunity international, and 5% into Warm Blankets."

(Opportunity International is a cool organization in the field of microfinance -- they basically help lift people out of poverty by making micro-loans and fostering business.)

I'm not patting myself on the back; I think that the grace to emphasize such things may have come from above, but it's also because Craig blows my mind. For more information see www.warmblankets.org and www.opportunity.org.

If you made it this far, I encourage you to click on the little envelope icon right (below and to the right of this sentence), and email this to a friend or two, and ask them to do the same.

Sinsinawa Mound Center

Today I went to a very interesting event at the Sinsinawa Mound Center, in Sinsinawa, Wisconsin.

It was a commemoration/reconciliation event, on the 175th anniversary of the Blackhawk war, a conflict that resulted in the slaughtering of nearly every member of Blackhawk's tribe (something in the neighborhood of 1500), by members of the Illinois Militia. The handful that survived, from Blackhawk's own family, women and children who made it across the flooded Mississippi river somehow, did have descendants -- who had been forced up into Oklahoma. And one of Blackhawk's descendants is Chief Kay Rhoads, who is the leader of the Sac-Fox Nation, and was there at this event.

It was interesting, to learn about the events of the summer of 1832, from the native american perspective -- and to meet members of the Sac-Fox nation and learn more about their culture.


This is a view from coming up to the mound (keep in mind it is relatively flat farmland all the way around, so it rises up unusually; with apologies to experts -- I believe that the mound was sacred to native americans partly because of being a "high place".)



The entrance to the Center, with a view of land around:



Some tribal drumming (the voices were great! I'm planning on converting a recording to mp3 format so people can hear it on their ipods)



This was pretty cool -- a lot taller than sunflowers i guess -- wind power generators in the area:




This is a picture of the hopefully soon to be Dr. Todd, and Preston Duncan, a very interesting relative/descendant of Blackhawk, a noted speaker who gave a lot of insights (and who is a good traditional tribal dancer too!)




And this is Chief Kay Rhoads (on the right) and her sister. It was very interesting to hear Chief Rhoads talk about the Sac Fox nation, past and present history: