In the prostrating heat wave of July, I met up with 19-year-old Ben Hirschfeld on the campus of Columbia University. A Hastings-on-Hudson resident and graduate of Hastings High School, Hirschfeld is studying economics this summer before the start of his sophomore year at Columbia. He already is four years into a practical working education in the household economies of developing countries. It has been enlightening.
Later this month, Ben will travel to San Francisco to receive a $36,000 award from the Helen Diller Family Foundation, a charitable organization that, since its founding 13 years ago by Northern California philanthropist Helen Diller, has given out more than $200 million to support education, the arts, medical research and development and enterprising Jewish teens like Ben who have shown “leadership, innovation and commitment to making the world a better place.”
In June, the teen was one of 10 youths from across the U.S., and the only New Yorker, to receive the Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Award. A concept embedded in Judaism, “tikkun olam” is a Hebrew phrase that translates as “repair of the world.”
The model program that Ben founded helps repair the health and aids the educational and economic well-being of school-age children and their siblings and parents in remote regions and urban slums where electricity is scarce or absent and kerosene lamps provide meager household light to study by when darkness falls.
Ben was 15 and a high school freshman when he learned from his then-neighbor in Hastings-on-Hudson and activist for global literacy, Pam Allyn, of the conditions in which students did their homework in the impoverished countries in which her organization has worked.
Allyn is founder and executive director, as well as “chief storyteller,” of LitWorld, a New York City-based nonprofit organization that mobilizes children and adults from around the world to advocate for literacy as a basic human right. It is a right to which an estimated 793 million people, the majority of them females, remain deprived, according to LitWorld. In 2012, Allyn”™s organization ran more than 100 reading and writing clubs in 12 countries spread across five continents, reaching kids through their own personal stories that range from Harlem to Haiti to Kosovo to Rwanda to Iraq to Nepal.
Ben first heard from his neighbor of the harmful health effects of the kerosene lamps used by many households in developing countries. Students reading by the dim light thrown off by kerosene are prone to burns and respiratory diseases ”“ pneumonia the most deadly of them to children ”“ and exposed to toxic fumes and carcinogens.
“It”™s the equivalent from a very young age of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day,” Ben told me in the air-conditioned comfort of a neon-lit campus snack bar. “I knew I had to do something.”
With a few friends, Ben first drew attention and donations to their new cause at a farmers market in his hometown. He started Lit!, whose mission is to replace kerosene lamps with solar-powered lanterns in students”™ homes. His organization now is called Lit! Solar.
“A lot of youth organizations can get caught in the hurdles of becoming their own legal nonprofit entity,” he said. The founder of Lit!, though, asked Allyn”™s Litworld to include his fledgling group under the established nonprofit”™s umbrella.
“With us bringing light and them bringing literacy, there”™s a real synergy there,” he said. And the arrangement has allowed Lit! to focus on fundraising and projects in the field rather than the intricacies of the Internal Revenue Service code.
Lit!”™s supplier is d.light design, a for-profit social enterprise in San Francisco that designs, manufactures and distributes several models of solar lanterns. The company operates an African office in Nairobi, Kenya”™s capital, a chief focus of Ben”™s social enterprise. Lit! Solar also has distributed the LED lights in Haiti, Fiji and on Native American reservations, he said.
It is in Kibera, though, Nairobi”™s vast slum, where Lit! Solar”™s work could be said to shine brightest. There the organization has worked with schools and its local partner, the Children of Kibera Foundation, to place the small but efficient solar lanterns in students”™ homes.
“It costs us about $7 apiece on location in Kenya,” Ben said. “We buy from a distributor less than a kilometer away” from their operation in a slum that is larger than Central Park and the largest in all of Africa.
The solar study aids are not simple charitable handouts, however. Ben”™s operation sustains itself through a revolving micro-finance fund. Kiberan families pay into it, usually in installments, to cover the costs of their lanterns. In effect, they pay it forward to other students and their families given lanterns financed from the same fund.
“People may not be able to afford the lantern up front, but if they pay in pieces, just about everybody can afford it,” Ben said.
In the course of a year, he said, a family will pay up to seven times the cost of a solar lantern for kerosene fuel. Recipients of d.light”™s solar technology are asked to fill out a questionnaire “to see how many dollars people are saving” in kerosene purchases. Savings are paid into the revolving fund to cover the cost of their lanterns.
The benefits of the clean, healthy, rooftop-renewable light radiate through a household.
“When we give students a lantern,” Ben told me, “it”™s not just the student, it”™s their family, especially the young kids, who are even more at risk” of illnesses that can be fatal from breathing in kerosene soot and fumes.
The night light also serves to increase productivity in adults. “The mother can sew at night, cook,” said the exemplar of tikkun olam.
The lights also foster entrepreneurship. Ben described a woman who was able to expand her business mending school uniforms in the bright light cast by the lantern. She could work longer “and she wasn”™t”™ sick with pneumonia anymore.”
Two summers ago, Ben traveled to Kenya and saw firsthand the slum conditions he had heard and read about and the good that Lit! Solar has wrought there,
“It was amazing to see the difference that this tiny piece of technology can make in the lives of their families,” he told me. Yet it was also “humbling” to walk through the enormous African slum. “It was an experience that both humbled me and spurred me on, seeing how many people it has yet to reach. We measure our success in the number of people that we reach.”
He said a conservative estimate puts that number at 10,000 children and adults. The $36,000 award awaiting him in San Francisco “will be big enough to help us reach an additional 15,000 people in this coming year,” he said eagerly.
Lit! Solar is already in talks with potential partners in Kenya and Nigeria, he said. The program in Kibera will expand to more schools, thanks to Helen Diller and her family foundation.
“I”™m very proud of the work that the charity has done and I”™ll do my best” to sustain it in the years to come, he said.
The briefcase-toting student had a train to catch to Hastings-on-Hudson. He hustled off into the blazing light and mugging heat of the city.
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