Every three seconds someone in the world dies in extreme poverty. Usually it's a child, and typically it's from a preventable disease. While shocking, for many that number can feel abstract, or distant, or both.

To help put it in perspective, consider the following. Before you are done reading this article, 100 people will have died. Over the course of one quarter of an NBA basketball game, without taking into account any stoppages of play, 240 people will be dead. During the 48 minutes of actual game time, almost 1000 people will die. Kobe Bryant will make over $200,000 for that game alone.

In the time it will take you to watch this film, nearly 2,500 people will die. Every two and a half hours, the casualties inflicted by extreme poverty surpass the death toll from 9/11. Every week, extreme poverty claims enough life to wipe out the population of Durham, North Carolina. Every four months, the number of lives lost to extreme poverty reaches a higher number than American casualties in every war combined.

Every year, 10.5 million people die.

If one person every three seconds seems abstract, 10.5 million people each year almost becomes too concrete. For many, the sheer magnitude of that number proves paralyzingly overwhelming. For as long as problems have existed, people have asked some version of the same question:

What difference can I, as one person, possibly make for 10.5 million?

The stories profiled in this film offer a profound and surprising answer to that question. While the details vary widely, a common thread binds all of these people together: each of them identified a cause that appeared definitively insurmountable, then disproved that appearance by relying almost exclusively on perseverance and a belief in human decency.

Congratulations to our strategic partner, Dialog, for being named one of the "Most Democratic Workplaces in the World".

The global awards, sponsored by WorldBlu ( www.Worldblu.org ), a company specializing in democracy in the workplace, honors unique and innovative for-profit and non-profit organizations, as part of “Democracy in the Workplace Day”, which is an annual event celebrated on April 13. Read more ...