Part II
Sunday, August 31, 2008
MBAs Lift Non-Profit Sector
From the Financial Times:
By Sarah Murray
July 28, 2008
When discussing the social sector, Bill Drayton, founder and chief executive of Ashoka, a non-profit organisation that promotes social entrepreneurs, remembers the sector 25 years ago.
“Salaries were pathetic, smart people would avoid it, it was disorganised,” he says. “That’s all gone. We’ve been catching up and once you go from non-competitive to competitive, organisations have to join in the party or they’ll be eaten alive.”
As many non-profit organisations strive to make their operations more professional, a growing number of their employees are choosing to take an MBA.
“We are definitely seeing more of them in the part-time MBA programme,” says Liz Livingston Howard, associate director of the Centre for Non-profit Management at the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern University in the US. “There’s been a statistically significant increase in the past 10 years.”
In the past, executives seeking qualifications that would help them in the non-profit sector headed to policy schools or took programmes in education or non-profit management. “Now a lot more people are going the MBA route,” says Mel Ochoa, who graduated from the NYU Stern MBA programme in May and heads the marketing department of Achievement First, a charter school organisation in Connecticut and Brooklyn.
Mr Ochoa says this is because of the new requirements of non-profit organisations. “They’re changing their attitude towards the people they want on staff,” he says. “They want a lot of the skills you learn in business school, such as strategy and finance – and they want those applied to their non-profits.”
Lara Galinsky head of strategy at Echoing Green, a US foundation that provides seed money and support to young social entrepreneurs, agrees. “An MBA is a coveted staff person,” she says. “In the non-profit field, we’re good generalists or we come with degrees in public policy or non-profit sector management – but we’re not steeped in traditional business skills. A business school student trained in a traditional curriculum is value added for us.”
Part of the reason more non-profit organisations value business school education lies in the changing nature of the donors that fund their activities. Many of the new generation of philanthropists made their money in business, rather than inheriting it, and look for the same rigorous standards of professionalism and accountability in the charities they fund.
“When you get people with that kind of business savvy, they don’t want to just write a cheque, but they want to change the nature of public education or global health,” says Nora Silver, director and adjunct professor at the Centre for Non-profit and Public Leadership at the Haas School of Business, in Berkeley, California. “Then the philanthropy looks very different.”
Read the full article
Saturday, August 30, 2008
When Sex Is a Business, You Can't Forget About Demand
From the Huffington Post:
By Sonia Ossorio
March 25, 2008
Whether it's a $30 sex act in a brothel in Flushing, Queens that markets to dishwashers and day laborers, or a $4,000 sex act sold through a glossy website, the demand by men for commercial sex in the United States today is overwhelming. It's time to take a hard look at the culture and laws in our society that make it so easy for television commentators to say it is a "victimless crime." I've been to Roosevelt Avenue in Queens where men on corners in this prostitution district get paid to hand out fliers covered in naked women's bodies. They'll guide you to the brothels that line the side streets filled with trafficked women from Central and South America. Men pay $30 for 15 minutes of sex.
Our image of the jet-set call girl is an illusion. Rare news about the workings of the upper-end of the prostitution industry is now before us and the undeniable truth is they aren't the empowered women characterized in movies, music and the American psyche. Behind the polished pictures and polite language of the now-shuttered Emperor's Club VIP is the woman Governor Eliot Spitzer summoned to Washington D. C. for paid sex: a 22-year-old from a broken home, who's abused drugs, been abused and wasn't sure how she was going to pay the next month's rent.
There's a clear link between the proliferation of prostitution and a flourishing sex-trafficking industry. Our country and the State of New York have made great strides in passing laws that are aimed at stemming the tide of prostitution and trafficking. In 2000, the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act was passed and gave the Justice Department further tools to fight the proliferation of organized prostitution. Led by Governor Spitzer himself, New York State passed a tough anti-trafficking law in 2007 which gives local prosecutors the new crime of trafficking to indict traffickers and pimps.
But we still have a long way to go. The bill, while important, lacks the funding or the teeth to enact real change. (As I wrote in the Albany Times-Union today, New York state is currently allocating only $450,000 in this year's budget to combat sex trafficking. It takes more money than that to clear snow from New York City streets for one day.)
All the while, the prostitution industry has boomed. JFK Airport is one of the main hubs used by traffickers, according to the Justice Department. Flip past the electronics category of the Yellow Pages and you'll find dozens of pages of escort service listings. Manhattan's Verizon Yellow Pages has startling images of girls that appear to be as young as 10 years old. And it's clear that these are big operations: it costs $45,000 upfront for a full-page ad in the escort category.
We will never make progress until we address demand, until johns face stiffer penalties and public shame instead of a free pass and bragging rights.
Read the full article
Friday, August 29, 2008
CATW Vs. HBO Round II
On September 23, 2008 CATW will hold a 2nd picket line in front of the corporate offices of HBO located at 1100 6th Avenue at 42nd St. to protest their 'reality series' Cathouse set in a brothel. CATW will address HBO's ongoing glamorization of prostitution by erasing its harms. HBO continues to distinguish itself as the industry leader in aggressively promoting the acceptance of prostitution which fuels sex trafficking.
When: September 23, 2008
Where: HBO Corporate offices
1100 Sixth Avenue, between 42nd and 43rd Streets, New York, NY
Time: 12:30pm-2pm
Part I
Slavery and Freedom in the Caribbean and Latin America
The Legacy of Slavery: Unequal Exchange conference resulted from the passage of Senate Bills 2199 and 1737 in 2000 and was meant to address a number of issues related to the economic and political legacy of slavery, the roles of governments and businesses in this enterprise, and the question of reparations for the descendants of slaves.
Cohen Milstein Files Human Trafficking Victims Lawsuit Against U.S. Military Contractors in Iraq
From Market Watch:
Aug 27, 2008
LOS ANGELES- Cohen Milstein, representing victims of human trafficking and their survivors, filed suit today in the United States District Court for the Central District of California against a prominent U.S. military contractor, Kellogg Brown & Root, Inc. ("KBR"), and its Jordanian subcontractor, Daoud & Partners ("Daoud"). During the relevant time period, KBR was the largest military contractor for the United States in Iraq.
According to the lawsuit, the trafficking victims include 13 Nepali men who were taken to Iraq against their will to provide menial labor at a United States military facility.
The men, ages 18-27, were recruited in Nepal to work as kitchen staff in hotels and restaurants in Amman, Jordan. Their families went deep into debt to arrange the jobs, which they hoped would lift them out of poverty. Once they arrived in Jordan, however, they were not provided the expected employment. Instead, their passports were seized, they were held against their will, and they were told that they were being sent to work at a military facility in Iraq, the United States Al Asad Airbase.
The men allege that the illicit trafficking scheme--from their recruitment in Nepal to their eventual employment in Iraq--was engineered by KBR and its subcontractor Daoud.
Tragically, as the men were being transported to Iraq, a car containing twelve of the men was stopped by members of the Ansar al-Sunna Army, an insurgent group. The 12 men in the car were taken hostage and executed by the insurgents. The executions were filmed and posted on the Internet.
The Inspector General for the United States Department of Defense investigated and confirmed the facts related to the fate of the 12 men, which led to increased enforcement of anti-trafficking measures by the United States.
The 13th trafficking victim, Buddi Prasad Gurung, was not kidnapped with the others and arrived at the U.S. military facility in August 2004. He was assigned to work as a loader/unloader in a warehouse, supervised by KBR.
For 15 months, Mr. Gurung was held in Iraq against his will, before KBR and Daoud allowed him to return home to Nepal. Mr. Gurung has joined with the family members of the 12 deceased victims to file claims under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and the Alien Tort Claims Act.
They are represented by Agnieszka Fryszman, Matthew Handley, and Molly McOwen of Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll P.L.L.C. (Washington, D.C.) Cohen Milstein's International Human Rights practice group has earned a stellar reputation for its work representing victims of forced and slave labor and other violations of international law.
A copy of the human trafficking complaint is available on the firm's website, www.cmht.com, as are copies of relevant Department of Defense documents. Ms. Fryszman and Mr. Handley are available for comment.
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