The RCEF Blog 博客

I’m back in China now after the whirlwind New York trip and CGI 2008. It’s great to be back in Houjia Village, where the fall harvest has roads covered in piles of golden corn kernels. I’m usually the last one to return to our village home at night, but yesterday my landlords were still up past 10 PM husking corn. It feels like finals week for farmers as they rush to clear the fields of corn so they can plant wheat. Li Dage (one of my landlords) said I have to take the day off from RCEF to finish off the monster pile in our entryway so I gotta finish writing quickly.

This morning, I spent some time sorting through photos and the thick stack of business cards collected at CGI. Here are my two favorite photos…the ones where my old teenybopper side came out. (Few people know but I used to be the ultimate international conference teenybopper!) The first photo is with Kevin Johnson, NBA star turned charter school founder and now mayoral candidate for my hometown capital, Sacramento. He was really nice and assuaged my sadness about a failed attempt to talk to Michelle Rhee.

The other is with…yes, that’s right!…Anthony Edwards of E.R. He is very involved with ShoesforAfrica and even convinced ER makers to donate money to their hospital in return for him coming back on the show this season. I kept seeing him throughout the conference but didn’t think it could actually be HIM. On the last day, I was close enough to confirm that yes, Dr. Green was back! I co-opted some security guards to lie in wait with my camera to capture our historic meeting.

Anyways, in addition to those two star encounters, I met founders of some amazing organizations that have approaches RCEF can learn from. Check them out sometime!

Agastya International Foundation “sparks creativity in rural India” by delivering science education. They have buses equipped with science labs that travel to different schools so kids can engage in hands-on learning. They also train teachers. Chairman and founder Ramji Raghavan told me that a big breakthrough was discovering that one of the bus drivers, who had no high school diploma, was also one of their best science teachers. This helped transform the way they recruited employees to run their model at the grassroots.

African Leadership Academy: Leadership curriculum to cultivate the next generation of African leaders.

Curriki: Provides an online platform (kind of like a wiki) for teachers around the world to create and share curriculum. Is starting to be adopted by entire school districts in different countries.

Aflatoun Child Social & Financial Education: Teaches children how to budget, save, and spend to improve their own lives as well as their communities.

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