August 28, 2024
Written by Gina Gabel, Thrive-Co-Founder
Gina on a field visit in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The simple reason why.
I couldn’t look at the big brown eyes of the children begging for food every day and not do something. In short, that is my answer to, “Why Thrive?”
Our family landed in Dhaka after my husband, Louie, accepted a diplomatic assignment to Bangladesh. At the time our girls, Lucy and Alice, were just five and three. Dhaka couldn’t be more different from the town in Michigan where I was born, raised, and currently live. It was during my short time in the megacity that I saw poverty and hunger up close, and it changed my life.
I visited a little school in the Korail slums with my friends, Priscilla and Regina and others from the US Embassy. We quickly realized that these schoolchildren weren’t getting the nutrition they needed. Their parents couldn’t afford to feed them properly on an income of $1 to $2 a day. We learned that the school provided the children with one banana every Thursday, so we asked, “How about we bring bananas on Tuesdays?” That’s when Priscilla, Regina, and I became the co-founders of Thrive–November 2012.
After we shared our visit on Facebook, our friends back home were inspired to donate money to the cause, and our friends in Dhaka immediately jumped in to donate food. With community support, we spoke with local nutritionists and settled on a meal of a banana, a boiled egg, and vegetables. This combination gave us the biggest nutritional bang for our buck. We began delivering school meals once a week, then twice, then three times until we were feeding all the children in the very first school every day of the week. Once we hit that milestone, many other school directors reached out to us to provide daily nutrition for their students, and we began adding more schools.
After a few weeks in, when we asked the children why the weren’t eating the boiled eggs we delivered, one the little girls answered, “I’m taking it home to share with my family.” We knew then that we were doing the exact right thing.
This is why Thrive is important to me, why I give, and why I’ve been drumming up global support for Thrive for the last eleven years and 9 months. Thrive matters.
Your turn! Why do you support Thrives’s work? You can tell us HERE.
Endless thanks,
Gina
P.S. Here’a video about how we bought eggs in Thrive’s early days.
