Congratulations to our awesome GiveForward community member, Joe Curtin! He was featured in the Wall Street Journal for his altruistic work in Nepal! We spoke with Joe about how he found GiveForward, and it’s definitely an interesting story.
While making a 112-day road trip he had always dreamed about, Joe re-connected with a woman he had met at a wedding several years prior, and the two agreed to keep in touch. Shortly after the road trip ended, Joe traveled to Asia for a while. He found Nepal to be especially eye-opening, and after deciding to help this poverty-stricken community of people who had been so hospitable, all he could think about upon his return to the US was: “how on earth can I raise money for a school half a word away?”
Joe mentioned this dilemma to his friend from the wedding and she told him that she had been using GiveForward to raise money for a friend with an ill daughter. “That was the first I heard of GiveForward, and the rest is history,” Joe says.
We just think it’s so cool how a small-world occurrence like re-connecting with someone he met years ago has led Joe to make such a big-world impact by raising money online to help build a school in Nepal. To all those who donated, Joe, the woman who told Joe about GiveForward, and the people whose wedding enabled their chance meeting in the first place, thank you!
By Shelly Banjo
Joe Curtin is determined to change the course of his life. In the meantime, the Endwell, N.Y., native has discovered he can help others do the same.
This month, Mr. Curtin will give $11,000 to the Nabin Primary School in the Kavre district of Nepal, enabling it to purchase a plot of land and to build a new building and playground.
Joe Curtin
Earlier this year, when Mr. Curtin, 29 years old, flew to Taiwan for a friend’s wedding, he met a Buddhist monk involved in charitable work around the world.
“I told him I wanted to quit my job and join the Peace Corps, and he said you don’t have to wait for a government agency, just pack your bags, fly to a country and start working,” Mr. Curtin says.
So he did just that: He quit his job with aerospace and defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. and flew to Nepal for two weeks.
“I didn’t think I was adding much value to the world by sitting at a desk, and I’d had enough of the corporate world,” Mr. Curtin says. “In Nepal, I met the most generous people in the world who have very little, and I wanted to do something to help.”
After visiting a number of organizations across the country, he came to the Nabin Primary School and learned of the school’s intention to build a new school and playground. Without purchasing the privately owned land, estimated at $11,000, he said, the school would not have been able to qualify for a number of government programs and grants.
A spokesman for the World Bank said Nabin is one of thousands of government-run schools across Nepal receiving funds and training from the United Nations Children’s Fund in partnership with the country’s Department of Education.
“Eleven thousand dollars is nothing in the Western World,” Mr. Curtin says. “In Nepal, where the average person lives on a few dollars a day, it seemed implausible.”
When he returned home in October, he says he solicited friends, family members and “anyone else he could reach” to collect money through the fund-raising Web site GiveForward.com.
Within two months, he had reached his goal of $11,000, and he intends to continue raising money through February. In the spring, Mr. Curtin will volunteer with the Peace Corps in South America.
