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Founded in 1922, the AHS is among the oldest and most prestigious horticultural organizations in the United States. Our mission is to share the critical role of plants, gardens, and green spaces while helping to create healthy, livable communities and a sustainable planet. AHS fulfills its mission through educational programming, The American Gardener magazine, Great American Gardeners Awards, the AHS Garden Network, National Children & Youth Garden Symposium, Travel Study Program, and exemplary gardens at our national headquarters, River Farm. AHS work is national in scope.

We believe that educational programs that emphasize critical real world problem-solving skills are powerful drivers of positive change. We are committed to delivering these programs to empower teachers and students in the world's poorest communities, setting in motion cycles of positive change to resolve the underlying causes of poverty and injustice. Our Vision:An education that empowers all children to defend and safeguard their fundamental human rights, creating a more peaceful and just world. Our Values: Webelieve that education is a fundamental human right. We believe that education is the driver of real change. Webelieve that a meaningful education empowers ALL people to live in dignity and in peace.

Committed to inspiring curiosity through exploration, the Buffalo Museum of Science is a non-profit educational institution dedicated to providing relevant science programming and services to children, families, adults, and schools in the Buffalo Niagara region. Through exhibits and interactive science studios designed for multi-generational learning, the Museum showcases its extensive collections of over 700,000 specimens and artifacts representing all facets of the natural world with an emphasis on Western New York. Opened in 1929 in Buffalo’s Olmsted-designed Martin Luther King, Jr. Park, the Museum is currently installing eight permanent interactive science studios to transform its visitor experience by 2017. The Museum also operates Tifft Nature Preserve in South Buffalo, a 264-acre urban wetland preserve on reclaimed former industrial land. Learn more at www.sciencebuff.org.

The mission of Lindsay Wildlife Experience is to connect people with wildlife to inspire responsibility and respect for the world we share. The museum was founded in 1955 by Alexander Lindsay, a local businessman, to teach children about natural sciences, particularly wildlife and their habitats. Over the years, the museum has developed a permanent collection of live, non-releasable native California wildlife and related artifacts. Lindsay is also a leader in the field of wildlife rehabilitation with a full veterinary staff and more than 500 volunteers. It is the first, and frequently only, resource for those who encounter injured, ill, or orphaned wildlife of all species, native mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles . During the recent drought years, Lindsay has treated record number of wild animals (more than 5,700 in the first 10 months of 2015). Begun in 1970, this formal wildlife rehabilitation program was the first of its kind in the United States.

WE CARE Solar promotes safe motherhood and reduces maternal mortality in developing regions by providing health workers with reliable lighting, mobile communication, and blood bank refrigeration using solar electricity. The Problem Maternal mortality worldwide accounts for more than half a million deaths a year; 99 percent of these occur in underdeveloped countries. For every maternal death, at least 20 women suffer severe complications from childbirth. Major causes of maternal death include obstetric hemorrhage, obstructive labor, eclampsia, and sepsis. These emergencies cannot always be predicted, nor are they always preventable. However, with prompt, appropriate and reliable medical care, they are unlikely to result in loss of life. Sporadic electricity impairs the operation of surgical wards, delivery wards, essential hospital equipment, and hospital communication devices. This compromises the ability of health workers to provide safe, appropriate and timely medical care. Labor and delivery nurses cannot quickly notify on-call physicians of emergencies. Midwives and physicians are forced to make treatment decisions without the benefit of necessary diagnostic tests. Obstetric procedures and emergency surgeries are conducted under grossly suboptimal conditions, and can have tragic consequences. Our Background Co-founder Dr. Laura Stachel went to Northern Nigeria in 2008 to study ways to lower maternal mortality in state hospitals. She witnessed deplorable conditions in state facilities including sporadic electricity that impaired maternity and surgical care. Without a reliable source of electricity, nighttime deliveries were attended in near darkness, cesarean sections were cancelled or conducted by flashlight, and critically ill patients waited hours or days for life-saving procedures. The outcomes were often tragic. Laura wrote to her husband, Hal Aronson, a solar energy educator back in Berkeley, California. Together, Laura and Hal co-founded WE CARE Solar to improve maternal health outcomes in regions without reliable electricity. Hal designed an off-grid solar electric system for the hospital Laura was studying, targeting the maternity ward, labor room, laboratory and operating theatre. A Portable Solution Hal created a suitcase-sized prototype of the hospital solar electric system so Laura could show Nigerian hospital workers the LED lights, headlamps and walkie-talkies planned for deployment. When Laura returned to Nigeria toting the "solar suitcase," her Nigerian colleagues immediately grasped its significance and began using this kit to charge headlamps and walkie-talkies while they awaited the larger solar installation. In addition, hospital employees introduced Laura to clinicians in outlying health facilities who begged her to bring solar lighting to their own clinics, too. Our five-year goal is to serve 5 million mothers in remote areas by deploying 10,000 Solar Suitcases to health care facilities around the globe.

Over 600 million Indians defecate in the open every day because they have no toilet. This practice cripples health, economic, and social outcomes. Open defecation (OD) causes the spread of infectious diseases that kill an estimated 300,000 children under five every year. The economic costs of OD total nearly $54 billion lost each year in India, with rural households bearing the highest per capita loss. Furthermore, women and girls who lack convenient access to toilets often miss school and work while they are menstruating. SHRI ends open defecation in India by constructing community toilet facilities that are free to use. They include eight toilets for women, eight for men, hand-washing stations, and a biogas digester (a large underground tank). Human excrement is stored in this tank where it decomposes to produce methane gas. SHRI uses this energy source to produce electricity, which powers a water filtration plant that uses a patented resin filter to remove arsenic, fluoride, iron, and bacterial contaminants. The resulting potable water is sold for $0.008 per liter, less than half the current market cost, helping SHRI to generate revenue to offset its monthly facility O&M costs. This ensures facility cleanliness, a key predictor of sustained toilet use. Thus SHRI fights alongside rural Indian communities to end open defecation as a key step in the struggle for health equity, and social and economic justice.

The Movimento de Saude Mental Comunitaria do Bom Jardim (MSMCBJ) was initiated in 1996 as part of the outreach of the Comboni Missionaries in the Northeast of Brazil. MSMCBJ seeks to improve the lives of the people of the economically impoverished peripheral regions of Fortaleza, primarily the area of Grande Bom Jardim. To imagine a mental health project in a peripheral neighborhood like Bom Jardim, where the majority of people live in at-risk circumstances - in which extreme poverty, violence, a lack of housing and basic sanitation, street children, and unemployment predominate - is to believe that, even within pain and suffering, we can harvest flowers. That is, personal and social realities can be transformed. The challenge that MSMCBJ has been overcoming throughout its years of community action has been to demonstrate that, through the Community Systemic Approach, working with people's self-esteem results in greater self-awareness, which empowers people to create paths of liberation, thanks to the sense of participation and co-responsibility that MSMCBJ activities favor. The Movimento de Saude Mental Comunitaria do Bom Jardim welcomes the human being, respecting their bio-psycho-socio-spiritual dimensions, promoting the development of their potential, through the restoration of human rights and cultural values, with the goal of improving the quality their personal, interpersonal, and community relationships, for the promotion of the gift of life. We welcome and accept all people, despite their social class, race, religion, gender, or age; We stimulate the development of quality personal, group, community, social, and ecological relationships; We believe in the diversity of cultural roots as a principle on the strengthening of identity for the liberation and development of the human being; We exist within and are nourished by a loving spirituality in the search for personal and social integration and liberation; We offer a space for affective listening as an essential therapeutic instrument for the awakening and development of life; We participate in the development of human potential with the vision of autonomy and co-responsibility in the construction of the project of life; We value and recognize the talents of the individual, encouraging transparent and affective relationships as an opportunity for personal and professional growth; We believe in a work relationship that encourages the overcoming of conflicts as a form of maturing and growth; We encourage the awakening of a new consciousness that cultivates the essential values of love, peace, and justice; We gladly welcome partnerships that help to realize these life-restoring actions.