A Symposium on Meeting Needs in Developing Countries, July 8-11th in Savannah, Georgia

Read the Press Release [PDF]: Sustaining Hope presents “Meeting Needs in Developing Countries"

 

Purpose

The purpose of Sustaining Hope: A Symposium on Meeting Needs in Developing Countries is to network effective humanitarian groups to cooperatively meet the needs in developing countries.

About Sustaining Hope

In October of 2009, filmmaker Mark Ezra Stokes followed lifelong humanitarian Linnie Darden Jr. on his return to Ethiopia after a 45-year absence.

Darden had played a key role in establishing Ethiopia's first school for the deaf (now called Mekanissa School for the Deaf) during his stint as a young missionary in the early 1960s. What began as an attempt to document the needs of Ethiopian orphans through Darden's distinct perspective resulted in an epiphany: a realization of the dire needs in Ethiopia that could be met with relative ease should the two men collaborate to make the most of their resources and contacts. And thus, over a weekly lunch in downtown Savannah, an entity was born.

Sustaining Hope was established to encourage collaboration across the traditional barriers of ideology, religion, race and many other differences. The Sustaining Hope symposium will be a four-day event for their quickly-growing network of philanthropically-minded organizations. It will be a cooperative attempt to address the most immediate needs in the Third World and, learning from the experiences of established organizations, actively collaborating to meet those needs effectively.