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| Philanthropy |
Filling Four Fissures
William Jefferson Clinton
05/03/2004
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The first area is the
economic empowerment of poor people and poor communities, at home and around the
world. The William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation has established a great
Small Business Initiative in Harlem, which will now be replicated elsewhere in
New York City thanks to New York University’s Stern School of Business, and
eventually all across America. After the earthquakes in Gujarat, I helped to set
up the American India Foundation, and we have now raised several million dollars
to help build economic and education projects in Gujarat and throughout India
that will contribute to the long-term and sustainable development of the part of
the Indian economy that is not being swept up by the big high-tech
centers.
Second, I wanted to work on racial and religious reconciliation. To
this end, we have set up the Clinton Peace Center in Northern Ireland. I just
took two trips to the Middle East, trying to help overcome the massive misperceptions that the Muslim world and we have about each other. That is a
dicey area for me because you can have only one president and one foreign policy
at one time, but there are a lot of underlying issues that all people of
goodwill can address.
The third thing we work on at the Clinton Foundation
is education and expanding community service by young people, at home and around
the world. We have a Clinton Democracy Fellowship program in South Africa, and
we are sending Americans to devise a feasibility study on bringing kids from
Rwanda to America to attend school. If you do something that helps one child,
you never know what kind of an impact you are going to have.
The fourth area
of my foundation’s work is the fight against HIV/AIDS; I kind of fell into that.
When I left office, President Nelson Mandela and I agreed to help Sandy Thurman,
who ran the AIDS program in the White House in my Administration, with a group
called the International AIDS Trust. Our plan was simply to go around the world
and berate all the world leaders still in office to give more money to the fight
against AIDS. Then, in 2002, at the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona,
Dr. Denzil Douglas, a medical doctor who is the prime minister of St. Kitts and
Nevis and the head of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and the
Caribbean community’s efforts against AIDS, told me that what he would really
like me to do is help his country set up health care networks that would provide
HIV/AIDS care and treatment, and then figure out how to pay for the medicine to
keep the patients alive.
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