November 2, 2007 - 3:07pm — jlsphar
SAGE's Part in Reducing the World's Poverty
Understand that it is not folly to dream or take action toward the illusive impossibilities. After all, there are, on average, around eighty-seven thousand aircrafts in the sky on any given day, yet the Wright brothers were thought to be quite insane. Now take the fact that nearly three billion people live on less than two dollars a day. Why haven't we taken the same scope of vision as the Wright brothers had? We need tools. Just like it takes an airplane to fly, something will have to be used to provide a catalyst to end the world's poverty. Luckily, there are many organizations attempting this feat; but one stands out over the others. Let us empower the youth of the world with education specifically tailored to encourage entrepreneurship. Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship, otherwise known as SAGE, is a young organization based out of California State University, Chico. Started as a project for the free enterprise organization SIFE, it has transformed itself into it's own 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that has grown from reaching three-thousand five-hundred students in nine countries to five thousand high-schoolers in thirteen different countries in one year. This organization grows the fruit of tomorrow by planting the seeds in today's youth. SAGE teaches high-school children to create their own profitable businesses that incorporate components that increase social responsibility, global awareness, civic engagement, and environmental stewardship. SAGE then harvests donations and grants to host regional, national, and global competitions to have the students showcase their ventures to, on average, sixty influential business people. The logic is simple: while businesses are pumping money into the economy, more and more jobs are opening up. This is the information age where the world-wide-web will continue to balance the global markets. These markets are defined in the popular concept of globalization, which states in a nutshell that even the smallest countries will be compared on a global scale. Is this 'information age' the deep breath before the ultimate plunge or is this an age to provide a means to give back to our global neighbors? SAGE implements globalization in order to tweak the balance of resources between countries and individuals. Please, understand that it is not folly to dream or take action toward the illusive impossibilities; for that dream is now lucid.