Our Story

Our VisionAt World Connect we believe that women and children are the centerpieces of their communities and when they have opportunities to thrive, their communities thrive.

We also believe that creating opportunities for women and children to thrive is within our reach, every day. The projects we support are easy to implement and inspire the next generation of global citizens.

World Connect imagines a future where women and children are educated and valued, where their health concerns are acknowledged and treated, where they’re respected for their skills, their pivotal roles in their communities, and where they can laugh, love, and enjoy life.

Our ResultsWorld Connect has launched projects in 13 developing countries around the world. Our projects promote health, education, environmental, and economic opportunity and usher in the momentum of change that communities need and keep the progress going.

More than 30,000 women and children have been directly impacted by World Connect projects.

We’ve worked with 600+ local community leaders, community-based organizations and U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers to implement our projects. Peace Corps Volunteers, our primary implementing partners, say that their experiences with World Connect grants are a highlight of their experiences abroad.

World Connect’s young social entrepreneurs have raised thousands of dollars for projects around the world.

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Dear World Connect Friends and Supporters,

I write to thank you, and to tell you of a new phase in the charity you helped create.

Six years ago many of us joined together to start a program to improve the health and the welfare of women and children in the developing world.

After a period of thoughtful planning, we decided to launch our program by focusing on improving infant and maternal mortality in the Dominican Republic. Together, a team of compassionate and talented health care professionals trained hundreds of Dominican medical workers in simple but effective ways to reduce infant and maternal mortality. By combining this training with the supply of millions of dollars of medical equipment to Dominican hospitals, we were able to improve the welfare of local mothers as we discovered how to empower local community leaders. This same notion of combining generosity, developing world leadership and the talented commitment of a small staff at World Connect has been the heart and soul of World Connect’s philosophy and actions ever since.

To scale our contributions to the welfare of developing world women and children outside the Dominican Republic we then built upon both our experience and a business model developed by four young girls and one of World Connect’s extraordinary early leaders, Christa Thoerez, as they created what would later become a key part of World Connect, Kids to Kids.

Kids to Kids also began its programs in the Dominican Republic, but facing the limitations of being largely run by schoolage children, it was forced to innovate in order to manageably scale. How could these kids build an international program that would empower hundreds of local social entrepreneurs in a sustainable and principled way? By partnering with the Peace Corps in a way that respects the values and sparks the excitement of Peace Corps Volunteers in countries around the world, and builds a model of citizen democracy for kids all across America, Kids to Kids found a bright path forward. It’s a path World Connect follows now.

As you may know, the Peace Corps was started by President Kennedy in 1961, to promote international understanding at the community level. Today there are more than 9,000 Peace Corps volunteers in 76 countries. Each of them spends between two and three years embedded in a local community seeking to develop and implement programs to support a more sustainable world. Peace Corps Volunteers are drawn from among the most compassionate and daring of young American leaders.

Our partnership with the Peace Corps allows Peace Corps Volunteers, working alongside local, community-based organizations, to apply for a grant from World Connect to launch an innovative, grassroots program to empower women, protect the environment or educate children. Implementing World Connect projects in their community is often cited by returning Peace Corps Volunteers as among the most extraordinary experiences of their time abroad. Your generosity and the talent of the World Connect staff have now allowed us to implement projects in more than 500 villages in 12 countries, and to enable the dreams of more than 400 Peace Corps Volunteers drawn from virtually every state across the country. And we have only just begun.

In addition, while our programs in the last six years have focused on improving the circumstances of folks that live in communities far less fortunate than our own, the spirit of innovation and compassion that motivate your support has touched families across America as well, working with young people through their schools to teach them about the developing world and how they can discover their power to make change through their own philanthropic activities.

Whether it be in Senegal, El Salvador, or the Philippines, every World Connect project is reviewed for quality, impact and sustainability by the World Connect Board and staff, volunteers, and the Kids to Kids Youth Advisory Board. Between the young people across America who are volunteering with World Connect and the hundreds of Peace Corps Volunteers who have returned to their home towns touched by implementing a project with World Connect, our footprint across America is growing. Our plan for the years to come is to expand our projects to additional countries and to expand dramatically the number of American kids participating in our unique citizen democracy and cement the same spirit of local empowerment and endorsement we are achieving abroad, right here at home.

Thank you for the support you have given me and World Connect over the past six years. Please join us as we embark on the next phase of our journey together.

Yours,

Bill Haney