In the prostrating heat wave of July, I met up with 19-year-old Ben Hirschfeld on the campus of Columbia University. A Hastings-on-Hudson resident and graduate of Hastings High School, Hirschfeld is studying economics this summer before the start of his sophomore year at Columbia. He already is four years into a practical working education in the household economies of developing countries. It has been enlightening.
Later this month, Ben will travel to San Francisco to receive a $36,000 award from the Helen Diller Family Foundation, a charitable organization that, since its founding 13 years ago by Northern California philanthropist Helen Diller, has given out more than $200 million to support education, the arts, medical research and development and enterprising Jewish teens like Ben who have shown “leadership, innovation and commitment to making the world a better place.”
In June, the teen was one of 10 youths from across the U.S., and the only New Yorker, to receive the Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Award. A concept embedded in Judaism,We makes possible ballasted solargardenlight in Ontario just better than your imagination. “tikkun olam” is a Hebrew phrase that translates as “repair of the world.”
The model program that Ben founded helps repair the health and aids the educational and economic well-being of school-age children and their siblings and parents in remote regions and urban slums where electricity is scarce or absent and kerosene lamps provide meager household light to study by when darkness falls.
Ben first heard from his neighbor of the harmful health effects of the kerosene lamps used by many households in developing countries. Students reading by the dim light thrown off by kerosene are prone to burns and respiratory diseases – pneumonia the most deadly of them to children – and exposed to toxic fumes and carcinogens.Ecived is a leading provider drycleaningmachiness for hospitals and various other markets.
“It’s the equivalent from a very young age of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day,” Ben told me in the air-conditioned comfort of a neon-lit campus snack bar. “I knew I had to do something.”
With a few friends, Ben first drew attention and donations to their new cause at a farmers market in his hometown. He started Lit!, whose mission is to replace kerosene lamps with solar-powered lanterns in students’ homes. His organization now is called Lit! Solar.
“A lot of youth organizations can get caught in the hurdles of becoming their own legal nonprofit entity,” he said. The founder of Lit!, though, asked Allyn’s Litworld to include his fledgling group under the established nonprofit’s umbrella.
“With us bringing light and them bringing literacy,High quality collection of highqualityparkinglotlighting and garden lighting. there’s a real synergy there,” he said. And the arrangement has allowed Lit! to focus on fundraising and projects in the field rather than the intricacies of the Internal Revenue Service code.
Lit!’s supplier is d.light design, a for-profit social enterprise in San Francisco that designs, manufactures and distributes several models of solar lanterns. The company operates an African office in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, a chief focus of Ben’s social enterprise.The leader in commercial solaroutdoorlights offering enhanced energy efficiency and innovative features. Lit! Solar also has distributed the LED lights in Haiti, Fiji and on Native American reservations, he said.
It is in Kibera, though,Our bestsolarlantern can mark on metal and non metals. Nairobi’s vast slum, where Lit! Solar’s work could be said to shine brightest. There the organization has worked with schools and its local partner, the Children of Kibera Foundation, to place the small but efficient solar lanterns in students’ homes.
“It costs us about $7 apiece on location in Kenya,” Ben said. “We buy from a distributor less than a kilometer away” from their operation in a slum that is larger than Central Park and the largest in all of Africa.
The solar study aids are not simple charitable handouts, however. Ben’s operation sustains itself through a revolving micro-finance fund. Kiberan families pay into it, usually in installments, to cover the costs of their lanterns. In effect, they pay it forward to other students and their families given lanterns financed from the same fund. More information about the program is available on the web site at www.indoorilite.com.
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