Blue Chip Foundation Ethical Global Initiatives

Actions That Engage

Millennium Villages Project

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Our approach to improving the millions of lives of people living in poverty without access to electricity, health, or education involves collaboration and coordination among local communities, global leaders, nonprofits, donors, and experts. Our alignment with proven, globally established organizations provides a structural platform to achieve proven impact where it matters most.

Millennium Villages Project

In 2015 Blue Chip Foundation partnered with VII Photo Agency to document the impact and achievements of the Millennium Villages Project in its final year. The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) led by Professor Jeffrey Sachs is a research project of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in which an economic model to alleviate poverty is practiced. The Villages use an integrated approach to sustainable development to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. An understanding of the pathways to achieve the MDGs are of the utmost importance now as we enter into a new decade of achieving the new global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations. The road map is invaluable.

What We Do

Blue Chip Foundation   and VII Association seek to amplify the voices of local people and staff of MVP . We chose four of the fourteen Village sites which span across 8 countries in the poorest regions of Subsaharan Africa. By giving the individuals involved a chance to tell their stories, a greater consciousness of the diverse capacities of the project can be developed. The awareness generated by the project will create a dialogue about environmental, social, health and human rights issues that are of urgent concern. The ambition is to affect civic dialogue and seek further solutions to pressing problems that still remain in the villages as we transition to SDGs .
The project will enable an effective and broad reaching communication campaign to a world wide audience from policy makers to school children through collaboration with media and cultural organizations and using social media worldwide. The most successful initiatives of MVP have already been scaled up, and it is the hope of the  Blue Chip Foundation   that our unbiased documentation will inspire other communities and governments to implement some of the practices.

Millennium Villages Project has done an outstanding job in data collection which will be reflected in the final statistics of the projects success in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The statistics will be revealed in a book along with photographic stories that will be released in December of 2016. We seek to humanize these statistics with the photographs created by four respected journalists in VII Association that specialize in compassionate and empathetic story telling with integrity. The lives that have been transformed by this bold and ambitious project will be illuminated with both the positive effects of Millennium Villages Project shown, and also the complexities and difficulties..
The organizing principle for all narrative outcomes will be a deep and ambitious interactive (or trans-media) documentary that exists across multiple platforms and allows a non-linear reader experience. Interactive documentaries encourage viewers to explore the stories and geography of the project in their own unique way. Users will be able to experience qualitative (documentary) and quantitative (data driven) information at the same time through photography, documentaries, texts, oral histories, historical artifacts, maps and data visualizations. Along with the book, a museum quality photographic exhibition at the United Nations Headquarters will be held in December of 2016.

Ethics In Action

The three core goals of sustainable development —ending poverty, ending exclusion,  and protecting creation—demand the activation of universal ethical principles including human dignity, social justice, the common good, and shared well-being. As Laudato Si’ demonstrated, common ethical concerns of the major world religions helped the world to adopt common goals for our “common home,” most notably the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet this initial synergy among religious, social, and political leaders needs, for its full realization, a renewed orientation of values and ethics in relation to seven unprecedented challenges:

A man with a beard is talking to two other men in a room.

What We Do

We face, as well, a eighth, age-old challenge: restraining impunity in the public and private sectors. We experience today a global epidemic of corruption, abuse and arrogance of power in all social strata that weaken the sovereign power of the people and participatory democracy. There is also the repeated failure of political leaders to relinquish power on constitutional timetables.

These challenges are pressing for each of the great religions across all geographic   regions. The new project on  Ethics in Action   will bring together a select group of  religious leaders, academics, business and labor leaders, development practitioners, and activists, to identify values and ethical approaches to the eight challenges just outlined. The group will analyze the relevant and crosscutting social teachings of the various religions in a joint effort to discern the global values and principles capable of solving our contemporary challenges and overcoming the “globalization of  indifference.”
The group will work over three years, beginning in late 2016. It will meet at the  Casina Pio IV , headquarters of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS) and the  Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS), drawing on the academicians of the PAS and PASS together with invited specialists for each of the eight topics. The  group will aim to produce a set of significant recommendations for Ethics in Action :  ways to apply ethical principles and values shared across the major religions to support solutions to the major global challenges. The group will not aim for technical or policy solutions to these great challenges. Rather, it will focus on the underlying ethical principles and values absolutely needed to mobilize the human spirit to find liberating solutions to these great challenges in the defense of human dignity and liberty, the promotion of the common good, social justice, and shared wellbeing in true solidarity.

The Challenges

  • Global climate change and destruction of the intricate web of life, caused by economic activity

  • Poverty and deprivation of “work, shelter, and land,” in the midst of great plenty

  • Modern forms of slavery, human trafficking, forced labor, inhumane work conditions, the sale of organs, commercial sex work, and diverse forms of organized crime

  • Corporate power and structures of corporate abuse unmoored from public purpose and free from public oversight

  • Mass migration caused by regional violence and environmental degradation

  • Inter-communal violence exacerbated by failing states and rapidly widening economic inequalities

  • The dramatic shortfall of educational opportunities, with half of the world’s children not receiving an adequate education or outside of school entirely due to poverty, conflicts, environmental disasters, forced migration, modern slavery, or other abuses.
A gathering of workers involved in the 2 Million Community Health Workers program
Community Health Workers are the vital link between higher-cadre health professionals and the under-served communities in which these workers live. Healthy societies are productive societies. Community health worker programs create jobs, increase health services at scale, improve well-being, and enhance local and national economies. 2 million workers will be necessary to achieve broad health targets. The initiative will use a retraining program of the already available estimated 1 million active workers. The Community health worker program is responsible for direct economic stimulus providing employment for young people and women. Few other initiatives cover the broad array of the SDGs as does the community workers program.
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The snow-covered memorials of the First Bosniak Brigade, representing The Peace Project
Understanding how peace is achieved requires examination of the lessons learned from failures and successes of the past. Photographers and correspondents from the Peace Project have covered Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Rwanda, Indochina, and Colombia during times of conflict in each of these countries. Through a multi-disciplinary approach, the Peace Project will produce a book, exhibition, film, conference, and education program for the general public covering a range of subjects including the art of negotiation, gender, public and civil society, government and politics, and the endgame. Individuals who have experienced conflict will lend their voices from backgrounds
including law, public policy, mediation, reconciliation, and social justice. The project will launch in 2018.
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