The Complete Child and You has, since its inception, been a financial supporter of The Hunger Project, a global, strategic organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger.

Although part of your Kindermusik and Simply Music tuition goes directly to the extraordinary work of The Hunger Project from The Complete Child and You, we urge you to consider becoming part of this highly successful phenomenon and recognise the contribution you can make to your child’s life, not only through music, but through investing financially in charting the course for future generations. Your child or children could live in a world free from hunger and poverty and all its associated challenges, including environmental non-sustainability, threats to international security and the abuse, ill treatment and early but preventable deaths of women and children.

For more information about this extraordinarily successful organisation, making permanent and positive changes in our world, please read below and visit www.thp.org to find out more about investing your money in a world that is sustainable for generations to come.

MISSION

In Africa, Asia and Latin America, The Hunger Project empowers millions of women and men to end their own hunger. The Hunger Project has pioneered low-cost, bottom-up, gender-focused strategies in each region where hunger persists. These strategies mobilize clusters of rural villages to create and run their own programs that achieve lasting progress in health, education, nutrition and family income.

In all our work, the highest priority is the empowerment of women. Women traditionally bear primary responsibility for family health, education, nutrition and - increasingly - family income. Yet women have been systematically denied information, resources and voice in decisions that affect their lives.

VISION

The vision of a world free from hunger does not look like our present reality minus the problem of hunger.

Our vision of the future is not based on everyone achieving a Western-style, high-consumption lifestyle, which is environmentally unsustainable even for the one billion people who now live it. Nor does it permit one-sixth of the human family to continue to live in abject poverty.

The Hunger Project is committed to transcending this polarity — to creating a future that rejects the inevitability of hunger and recognizes the limitations of a consumerist society.

Achieving the sustainable end of hunger means nothing less than creating a new future for all humanity, a future where

• every day, every person has enough of the right food to be healthy and productive;
• babies are born healthy and strong, and girl babies are prized as much as boy babies;
• children stay alive, so parents can have smaller families;
• women and girls are full partners in society;
• people have control over their own lives and destinies, and all individuals have a chance to contribute;
• the values of honouring human beings and nature flourish

Principles

Confronting the Challenge of Ending Hunger

• Hunger persists: Each and every day, 20,000* people die as a consequence of chronic, persistent hunger. Approximately 800 million people live in conditions of poverty so severe that they are unable to obtain enough food to meet their daily requirements. This is not the kind of hunger that makes headlines, as in a famine, but a silent holocaust that continues day after day, month after month.
• Hunger can be ended: This waste of human lives is all the more tragic in that it can be ended. The world produces more than enough food for everyone and, if we act wisely, can continue to do so for future generations. The world community possesses the financial and technical resources necessary to end hunger.
• The world has committed itself to this goal. At the 1990 World Summit for Children and at a series of global conferences, including the Earth Summit in Rio, the Population Conference in Cairo, the Social Development Summit in Copenhagen and the Women's Conference in Beijing, the world community has committed itself time and again to meeting a series of goals by the year 2000 that would result in the end of hunger on our planet.
• A moral imperative/a practical necessity. These conferences have stressed that ending hunger is not only a moral imperative, but a practical necessity. Ending hunger is central to resolving an entire nexus of issues, such as population growth, civil unrest and environmental destruction, that will increasingly threaten the quality of life for everyone.
• A human issue. Today, ending hunger is not primarily a technical or a production issue, it is a human issue. Hunger persists because we, as human beings, have failed to organize our societies in ways that assure every person the chance to live a healthy and productive life.
• Limits to the conventional approach. Ending hunger is a highly complex challenge. It is increasingly clear that charitable responses and traditional bureaucratic programs, as useful as they may be, are insufficient to carry the day. More importantly, people increasingly recognize that conventional approaches are based on a framework of thinking that is inconsistent with what actually must be done to achieve the end of hunger on a sustainable basis.
• The commitment of The Hunger Project: The Hunger Project is committed to the end of hunger. This means that we are committed to empowering people to create permanent, society-wide solutions to the problem, and not content ourselves with charitable actions that only benefit a few. We are committed to identifying and utilizing an accurate framework of thinking, and pioneering strategies and actions that will enable humanity to create a new future - a future free from hunger.

The Need for a New Set of Principles

• The Hunger Project believes that the strategies and actions required to end hunger must emanate from a new set of principles. These principles are derived from an authentic confrontation with the commitment to ending hunger, and from a deeper examination of what it means to be human.
• Discovered in action: The principles of The Hunger Project are not created in a philosophical vacuum and then applied. They evolve and are refined in the action itself. The formulation of our principles changes as our experience grows. In this way, there is no room for arrogance. On the contrary, the work of ending hunger is a rigorous teacher of a complex subject, constantly requiring a spirit of humility and openness to discovery.

The Principles of The Hunger Project:

Who We Are as Human Beings

The persistence of hunger is a human issue. Therefore, the principles of The Hunger Project begin with the recognition of two essential elements of what it means to be human.

• The human spirit: The Hunger Project recognizes that in addition to survival needs, every human being has a fundamental need to lead a life of dignity, meaning and purpose - to know that our lives make a difference.
• Interconnectedness: Our actions are shaped by and affect all other people and our natural environment. Our responsibility extends beyond our immediate lives and families to the entire human family. Issues of hunger and poverty are not problems of one country or another but are global issues, and we must solve them as global citizens.

The Principles of The Hunger Project:

Creating a New Future

Ending hunger requires a true break with the status quo. It will not happen in the course of "business as usual." To resolve humanity's oldest and most pernicious problem requires four essential ingredients:

• Vision: Given who we are as human beings, what is critical to our progress is vision - seeing a future that can be achieved and is worth achieving. The vision that calls forth The Hunger Project is a sustainable future for humanity, a future in which all people have the opportunity to live healthy and productive lives in harmony with nature. We call this "the end of hunger."
• Commitment: Commitment is what allows individuals to encounter obstacles, frustrations and failures on the pathway to achievement and still keep going. It is increasingly clear that achieving the future we envision will not just happen. It must be made to happen, and this will require extraordinary commitment. Calling forth that commitment, and keeping it focused and sustained to fulfil the vision, is a vital responsibility of The Hunger Project.
• Leadership: Leadership is critical to every great human achievement. Ending hunger requires committed leadership at all levels of society - from the village to the district, state, nation and the international community - that can call forth vision and commitment, and mobilize people to take effective action.
• Strategy and Action: Meeting a challenge as complex and daunting as hunger in a world of finite resources requires brilliant strategy and high-leverage action. It requires inquiry, analysis and allocation of resources consistent with achieving the goal. Every action must be designed to take a quantum leap forward towards the goal. There must also be extraordinary flexibility of action. One must move down a pathway with sufficient intentionality to make progress, yet be willing at every moment to let go of one approach to take a better pathway.

The Principles of The Hunger Project:

A Paradigm for Success

The Hunger Project recognizes that creating truly effective strategies and actions for the end of hunger requires a new framework of thinking, that is, a new paradigm - a paradigm consistent with the end of hunger. The key elements of that new paradigm are

• Self-reliance: Conventional approaches have treated hungry people as the problem instead of the solution, as beneficiaries rather than the primary actors, working for their own self-reliance. All individuals have the right and the responsibility to be the authors of their own lives and their own development. The work of ending hunger must build from people's own creativity - their own skills, resources and decision making.
• Enabling Environment: People's ability to express their self-reliance is a function of the opportunities provided by the society. The work of ending hunger is therefore not feeding people. It is the work of creating an enabling environment in which people have the opportunity and empowerment they need to build lives of self-reliance.
• Empowerment of women: Women and girls are the most affected by hunger and poverty. Traditionally, women bear the primary responsibilities in the most relevant areas - food production, nutrition, family planning, primary health and education. Yet most development inputs continue to go to men. A central component of effective strategy must be the empowerment of women in ways that enable her to achieve improvements in all key areas that affect their lives and those of their families.
• Global responsibility, partnership and investment: Hunger is a global issue. All of us have the responsibility to stand in partnership with hungry people, committed to their success. The achievement of this goal represents a new future, not only for those who are hungry but for all people. Realizing this new future for all humanity requires investment, not charity.

The Campaign to End Hunger

• Not a program, but a phenomenon: The work of ending hunger cannot be accomplished by any one organization, or even any conceivable network of organizations. The end of hunger will not be a series of well-managed projects. It will be achieved through millions of actions, most of which will never be recognized, and will certainly not be monitored and measured.
• The end of hunger will be a phenomenon - an unleashing of the creativity and productivity of hundreds of millions of hungry people, and hundreds of thousands of effective strategies and actions that create the enabling environment for them to succeed.
• Catalysing that phenomenon: The phenomenon of strategy and action will not happen on its own. Individuals must take responsibility for making it happen.
• A movement, not an organization: For this reason, The Hunger Project can never be accurately thought of as merely an organization. It must be thought of as a movement, a campaign of individuals and organizations committed to taking strategic action to mobilize self-reliant development and transform the policy environment at every level so that people can succeed.
• Galvanizing the campaign at every level of society: The campaign for ending hunger starts with the creativity of hungry people - respecting them as the primary authors and actors of the work to end hunger, awakening them to a possibility for a better life, and working to clear away the obstacles to the success of their self-reliant action.
• Building upon the self-reliant efforts of hungry people, the campaign to end hunger must take action at every level of society - from the local level up to the national government, and to the level of the international community.