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1. Help the poorest
2. Create Justice
3. Provide sustainable, cost effective help
4. Be community focused
5. Prioritize Water Supply and Sanitation, Nutrition and Health Care
6. Project Reports

1. Help the poorest - Donating to the Foundation is an opportunity to help fellow people in this world live a better standard of living. We live in a time with enough information and resources for the whole world to live to a better standard. It does however require that those of us who are fortunate to be wealthy focus attention on helping the poor. Historically, all that is needed is enough to get the poor a foot on the development ladder, then they tend to look after themselves more. The Foundation for Community Inspiration offers a chance to help people in some of the poorest areas of the world, where some people live on less than $1/day. People like this often live in mud huts, without clean water, sanitation, education and suffering from death and illness due to the Malaria, AIDS and HIV epidemics. Note that money means a lot more to the poorest (them) than to the rich (us). So, it is more effective to help the poorest.

2. Create Justice - Is it fair that some people in the world have opportunities for incomes of around $20,000/year while others live on less than $1/day? We don't think so. By donating today, you could help raise the incomes of some of those poor people by helping them find a first foot on the development ladder, escaping the poverty trap.

3. Provide sustainable, cost effective help - the Foundation for Community Inspiration supports cost effective, sustainable development. We don't want to give one off donations which will only help now, making them expensive and ineffective, we want our aid to act as a catalyst for people to get on the first foot on the development ladder, to bring them out of the poverty trap. Then the cycle of development will then begin and they may progress out of poverty themselves with minimal input from us, as has occurred historically in India and Bangladesh for example. The Foundation ensures that it focuses on sustainable development by aiming to transcend the poverty trap by researching for the most effective procedures to do this. It has compiled a list of procedures ranked in order of effectiveness in transcending the poverty trap which it uses to evaluate which procedures to take. You can see those procedures here. Once we establish costs for a procedure in a particular location then we simply calculate the cost effectiveness and choose the most cost effective.

4. Be community focused - By focusing on and empowering communities, we are able to provide them with a tailored service. This suits their needs best and means that we provide a better service. Leaving them as chief decision makers makes them own the project, taking responsibility, meaning that if something goes wrong they will make more effort to resolve it. Empowering them to make decisions means that we are more likely to help, as they will likely choose what they want.

5. Prioritize Water Supply and Sanitation, Nutrition and Health Care- Perhaps surprisingly to the layman, malnutrition has been identified as one of the fundamental ingredients of the poverty trap. Malnutrition accounts for over 60% of illness worldwide, and is a factor in Malaria, TB, HIV and AIDS deaths. It also has legacy in maternal and child deaths. The Foundation identifies malnutrition as the number one problem in the poorest communities today. Effective solutions include maternal nutritional education and micronutrient fortified school meals. These are scored high on our effectiveness scale.

6. Project Reports - You can monitor for yourself how the project is progressing and check that your money is going where we claim by checking up on the current project page.