After receiving my request to friends and family today to use my upcoming 60th birthday as an opportunity to make donations to the work of Muhammad Yunus and The Grameen Foundation, Carol Davis of Miami, Florida, wrote the following letter to the Miami Herald:



"How are one billion people, the Nobel Peace Prize, and a bottle of refreshing spring water connected?

As a global community, we are in crisis and in desperate need of widespread tanglible solutions to a problem that ultimately affects us all. For the past 30 years Professor Muhammad Yunus, a trained economist, has been giving poor people all over the world an opportunity to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. It is a system known as microcredit. Microcredit is a program that extends small loans to very poor people for self-employment projects generate income, allowing them to care for themselves and their families. Since giving his first loan of $27 in 1976, Professor Yunus has helped millions of the world's poorest people to help themselves. On today, December 10, 2006, he along with the Grameen Bank he founded will be honored with a Nobel Peace Prize for their work.

During this time, I urge everyone to learn more about and honor the work of Professor Yunus and talk to their families, friends, co-workers and neighbors about the effects of poverty and how $27 is changing a village, a nation, and the world. Next time I drink my bottle of water, I will put an equal amount of money in a 'defeat poverty' box. Then maybe each month or so I can help some woman somewhere start her journey out of poverty. For me, that will be more refreshing than that spring water.

Finally I would like to challenge the Miami Dade County Commission to learn more about Professor Yunus and begin challenging each other to think "out of the box" in the manner of this great man in order to tackle so many of our local problems that have at their root the poverty of so many of our local residents.

Sincerely,

Carol M. Davis"

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