**Our apologies for the automated messages announcing a July 3rd meeting -- please note this date is incorrect.**

On Thursday, July 17th, we'll be joined by filmmaker Kobina Aidoo who will screen his new film, The Neo African Americans, a one hour documentary that explores how the rapid immigration from Africa and the Caribbean is transforming the African American narrative. [A preview of the film can be seen here: Preview - The Neo African Americans ]

About the filmmaker: At the same he was attending the University of Ghana, Kobina Aidoo was a television producer/director/editor, playing a key role in launching Metro TV, Ghana's private television station pioneer. He then came to Barry University in Miami, Florida, where he majored in Communications. Upon graduation, he worked as a new media producer for Warner Bros. Publications and then worked for a nonprofit initiative of Intel Corp. and the MIT Media Lab, helping underserved youth become technologically fluent. In 2005, he quit his MBA studies and went to Harvard Kennedy School of Government where he also served as Co-Chief Editor of the Africa Policy Journal. He graduated in 2007 as a Master in Public Policy and has spent majority of the last year writing, traveling and working on this documentary.

Join us at 6:30pm for conversation and snacks -- and we'll begin the screening around 6:45pm. After the film, we'll have a discussion and Q&A with the filmmaker.

Hope you can join us!

Warm regards,
Heather Haines

On Wednesday, June 11th, we'll be joined by Chris Blattman, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University and Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Development, who will present on "Children and Women at War: Why Our Hype Can Harm."

The past two years have seen a flurry of attention to children and women at war. The iconic image of the child soldier is the drug-crazed teenager, wielding an AK-47, assured of his magical immunity from enemy bullets. An equally common image is that of the troubled return to civilian life. The reintegration challenges faced by young women abducted and sold into armed groups is feared to be even worse; they are rejected by their families; their children, community pariahs.

How fortunate for all of us (and especially for the youth in question) that these images contradict the reality of most formerly recruited women and children. Indeed, an emerging body of research is dispelling many of these child soldering myths. The results suggest that youth are by-and-large psychologically resilient, peaceful, and enjoy significant support from their families. The largest and most persistent reintegration challenge is not psychosocial, it is economic and educational.

Unfortunately, the myths surrounding women and children returning from war dominate and distort policy aimed at preventing child recruitment and reintegrating children associated with armed groups. The most urgently needed solutions--access to schooling, a leg up in livelihoods--are ones we know how to provide, but that we are providing too seldom.

Join us at 6:30pm for casual conversation and snacks -- and we'll get the official part of the program started around 6:45pm.

Hope you can join us!

Warm regards,
Heather Haines

On Tuesday, March 25th, we will be joined by Brady Walkinshaw, who is with Development Dialogue on Values and Ethics, Human Development Network, at the World Bank. Walkinshaw will provide remarks and lead a discussion on faith and development.

Throughout the developing world, faith-inspired communities, organizations, and institutions may be of growing significance to broad issues and debates of equity, social justice, and poverty reduction. In sub-Saharan Africa, estimates suggest that faith-inspired organizations preside over as much as 70 percent of services in health and 30 percent in education. The areas of activity for faith-inspired organizations go on, and the contributions of the faith sector are addressed in different ways by development actors: in 2007, 34 percent of PEPFAR funding went to faith-based organizations, and from 2001 to 2005, USAID financing of faith-based organizations abroad, doubled. However, what may be cause for interest, is how much we understand about the roles of faith-inspired organizations in mainstream development activities. Walkinshaw will highlight basic trends, pose questions, and hope to spark some thoughtful conversation about what the multiple, varied, and significant roles of the faith sector may be.

Join us at 6:30pm for casual conversation and snacks -- and we'll get the official part of the program started around 6:45pm.

Hope you can join us!

Warm regards,
Heather Haines

We are delighted to be co-hosting in January with another MeetUp group: ICT (Information & Communication Technologies) for International Development Learning Network. The topic of this session will be Opportunities and Challenges of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project has started shipping laptops last month with the goal of "children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community."
What are the opportunities and challenges for this approach and vision? Can the project be faithful to its five core principles of child ownership; low ages; saturation; connection; and free and open source?

We'll begin at 6:00pm with snacks and conversation and then start the program at 6:30pm, with four OLPC featured experts including Jonathan Blocksom, creator of the GollyGee software and developer of the 3D graphics for the OLPC laptop; Mike Lee, organizer of the DC OLPC Learning Club; Justin Thorp, Web strategist/developer for CACI who worked on content initiatives with OLPC; and Wayan Vota, Director of Mercy Corps' MicroMentor by day and publisher of the widely-ready OLPC News site by night.

We have limited space given our larger group so please RSVP as soon as possible to attend. We look forward to seeing you there!

Warm regards,
Heather Haines

For our October Meetup, we will be joined by Elizabeth Gilhuly, organizer of the Washington DC Fair Trade Coalition and Tamiru Degefa, CEO of Abol Coffee. We'll screen the documentary "Black Gold" which follows Tadesse Meskela, the manager of Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union, as he tries to get a living wage for the 70,000 Ethiopian coffee farmers he represents .

Join us at 6:00pm for snacks and casual conversation. We'll begin the film at 6:30pm, to be followed by discussion and a coffee tasting with Abol Coffee Inc.

We hope you can join us!

Many thanks,
Heather Haines

Black Gold:
Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate the industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil, but the price paid to coffee farmers remains low. Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. Black Gold follows Tadesse Meskela as he tries to get a living wage for the 70,000 Ethiopian coffee farmers he represents. Black Gold offers a compelling introduction to the "Fair Trade" movement galvanizing consumers around the globe. At the conference, one African delegate explains, "Trade is more imp ortant than aid." Seven million Ethiopians are dependent on aid and Africa exports a smaller percentage of world trade today than 20 years ago - only 1%. If that figure only doubled it would represent 70 billion dollars, five times the amount of aid the continent receives.

Filmmakers, brothers Nick and Marc Francis, purpose was "to make a film that forced us, as Western consumers, to question some of our basic assumptions about our consumer lifestyle and its interaction with the rest of the world. And in so doing, we wanted to challenge the way in which the Western media bombards its audiences with an overload of de-contextualized images depicting poverty in Africa with no link to our own lives."