With Purpose Success, part 22

They lobby government for change. Some start their own nonprofit and target causes that for one reason or another are special to them. Sure, these young people may not attract as much attention as Paris Hilton. Shame on us!
Many student groups are becoming active in the search for global peace, thanks in part to philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis's Projects for Peace program (www.kwd100projectsforpeace.org), which grants a hundred student-led grassroots peace initiatives $10,000 each in annual funding. The idea is to bring new thinking to the global peace process.
Ursula Devine and Joseph Campo at the University of Oklahoma are using their grant to produce a documentary film that explores the life of ordinary people in the world's five most peaceful nations, as ranked by the Global Peace Index (Norway, New Zealand, Denmark, Ireland, and
Japan)-hoping to learn and illustrate what helpful practices might be transferable to other cultures. Fallon Chipidza, a student at Hamilton
College in Clinton, New York,, is using her grant to build a self-sustaining chicken farm at St. Theresa's preschool and orphanage in Zimbabwe. She hopes the chicken business will generate enough ongoing revenue to pay for the children's school fees. Eric Harshfield and Ana Jemec, students at the University of Virginia, are using their grant to build a sustainable water filtration system using abundant local resources in poor sections of
South Africa.
These programs and these kids are an inspiration. Many of them are taking advantage of a major life shift-graduating from college, or from high school-and using that moment as a stopping point to consider what good they might bring into the world before they press on with their daily affairs. Can you approximate, or even best, their example by using retirement or disability or the death of a spouse or becoming an empty nester or mailing in the last mortgage payment as the stopping point in which you redefine success and consider your potential to live a life of purpose?
Davis is herself an inspiration. A world-class philanthropist, political figure and international dignitary for much of her life, only on the eve of her one hundredth birthday did she hatch the Projects for Peace program, which may end up as her signature and most enduring legacy.
The project, in just its third year, is an invitation to undergraduates to design grassroots projects that they develop over the summer. Those judged most promising and practical get funded. The idea is to encourage today's youth to create ideas for building peace. "I want to use my one hundredth birthday to help young people launch some immediate initiatives-things that they can do during the summer-that will bring new thinking to the prospects of peace in the world," she said upon committing $1 million to the effort in February 2007. She regarded the students' peace projects that summer as so inspiring that she has continued to fund the program.
Davis is outspoken and surprisingly spry, in defiance of her age. An avid painter who likes to finish her pieces in less than three hours, she laughs while admitting to leaving the wrinkles out of her self portrait.