Elvis Presley shook hands with Richard Nixon in 1970, but it wasn’t much more than a fleeting photo op. When Bono got together with President Bush for lunch at the White House in October, however, they spoke for nearly two hours about debt relief, AIDS and other issues.
The outpouring of private charity to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina and two sister storms now ranks as the most generous in American history, surpassing donations after September 11, according to researchers who track philanthropy.
Americans have donated about $2.97 billion to families affected by hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, said Patrick Rooney, director of research at the University of Indiana’s Center on Philanthropy.
That surpasses the $2.8 billion donated after the terrorist attacks of 2001, he said.
Harvard University plans to use a recently announced $20 million donation from a Saudi prince to increase its focus on contemporary Islamic thought and Islam in South and Southeast Asia.
“The majority of Muslims live east of Karachi. Not as much attention has been given to those areas,” said Roy Mottahedeh, a history professor at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. “There’s a great deal of intellectual fervency in the Islamic world.”
Lutheran World Relief has received a $640,104 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help nomadic communities in Niger avert food crises through new approaches that help bring vulnerable populations back from the brink of hunger. The 18-month grant will support a project in the Dakoro region of Niger, working with nomadic pastoralists—communities that depend on livestock raising as their only livelihood—to help them both improve household nutrition and reduce the risk of food shortages.