Helen Keller International Announces Commitment to Clinton Global Initiative

New York, September 25, 2006 – Kathy Spahn, President and CEO of Helen Keller International, participated in the second annual meeting for the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) last week in New York City. Conceived of by former President Bill Clinton, CGI brings together a diverse group of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Current and former heads-of-state, CEOs, media representatives, religious leaders, philanthropists, and NGO and foundation executives convene at a non-partisan conference designed to produce actionable goals and objectives. Participants this year included Kofi Annan, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Hamid Karzai, Rupert Murdoch, Pervez Musharraf, Terry Semel, Desmond Tutu, and Muhammad Yunus.

Each participant makes a specific programmatic commitment to be accomplished within a specified time frame in one of the focus areas. This year, the four areas were Global Health, Energy and Climate Change, Mitigating Religious and Ethnic Conflict, and Poverty Alleviation.

Helen Keller International made a Global Health commitment to improve the nutritional status of children and adults living with HIV/AIDS in Cambodia, Côte d’Ivoire and Tanzania over the next three years by expanding its programs in Homestead Food Production (HFP) and by preventing and treating malnutrition among this vulnerable population.

As a leading agency in innovative nutrition programs, HKI will direct its expertise to enhance the lives of People Living with HIV/AIDS through two initiatives that can serve as models for scale-up and replication. In Cambodia and Tanzania, HKI will improve household food security and increase the availability and consumption of micronutrient-rich foods through home gardens and raising poultry. In Côte d’Ivoire, HKI will provide state-of-the-art interventions for the prevention and treatment of malnutrition to HIV-positive children on antiretroviral therapy.

President Clinton’s closing remarks concerned reconciling differences. He noted that the mapping of the human genome has revealed that each of us is 99.9% alike, and although only 1/10 of 1% of a gene accounts for all of our differences, we focus 90% of our energy on that tiny sliver of difference. HKI’s programs have been and will continue to be guided by the words of Helen Keller: “Society does not flourish by the antagonism of its atoms, but by . . . mutual helpfulness.”

Pictured above are Seth Waugh of Deutsche Bank, former President Bill Clinton, HKI President Kathy Spahn, and Bill Drayton of Ashoka.