The GreatEscape Foundation

About The GreatEscape Foundation

Your Participation in Our Annual Event

How to Make a Contribution

Some of our Noble Causes

Sad Global Facts

How to Better Understand the World

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About The GreatEscape Foundation

"If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time."
- Marian Wright Edelman

The GreatEscape Foundation was created in 2000 and is an IRS-approved tax-exempt 501(c)(3) California-based nonprofit organization designed to promote charitable giving and other noble causes associated with our The Global Scavenger Hunt™ events.

Why GreatEscape Foundation? Well, we believe that the combination of our twin giving strategies--elementary school educations and mirco-loans--can, and will, help our Foundation's recipients in their own Great Escape from poverty and dependence.

The Global Scavenger Hunt has a goal of raising $1 million for international causes in association with our annual competitions. Our philosophy is that giving back to our communities, and in our case, the global village in which we reside and play, is a critically important aspect of the GreatEscape Adventures, Inc..Global Good Neighbor Policy. (See: OUR PHILOSOPHY page.)

Trusting strangers in strange lands is our annual events unofficial motto and helping strangers in strange lands is our Foundation's goal!

The organizers, corporate sponsors, media outlets, travel partners, advisory board, producers and contestants (Teams) involved with The Global Scavenger Hunt travel adventure event will all be asked to assist us in our fundraising efforts for our noble cause-related goals as best they can. Please see below.

We want our supporters to know that we empty our reserves from time to time within days of dislocating human events and natural disasters (tsunami, Katrina, earthquake in Pakistan, etc.) and wholly support all the work being done by the many relief organizations, public and private, governments and NGO's during those tragic natural disasters. BUT, we appeal to you to not lose sight of the harsh reality and fact that people need our help and the ongoing support of our noble causes everyday of the year. In fact, the reality is that more people die monthly from AIDS in Africa alone, more people die monthly from malaria, and more children die monthly from preventable diseases leading to diarrhea deaths, than died in the wake of the destructive tsunami. Please remember to give year round and not just when the glare of the television cameras bring tragedy into our homes.

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Your Participation & Tax Deductibility?

The GreatEscape Foundation is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) California-based nonprofit organization designed to promote charitable giving and other noble causes associated with the annual GreatEscape: The Global Scavenger Hunt™ events.

The Global Scavenger Hunt annually sets a goal of raising $1 million for international causes in association with our annual competitions. And, therefore, aspects of your costs involved in participating in The Global Scavenger Hunt may be tax deductible. (Please consult your tax advisor or accountant for full details about what portion of your GreatEscape fees and other expenses are tax-deductible* to the extent allowed by law.)

How will we raise our million-dollar goal?

Teams participating in The Global Scavenger Hunt will be asked to attempt to secure a single US dollar in walkathon-like pledges, on a per kilometer traveled basis. (We know this can be a difficult endeavor for some, and we just ask that everyone to do their best!) Therefore: 25 two-person Teams traveling on the annual event's 40,000-kilometer around-the-world route at $1.00 per mile equals $40,000 raised per Team, and $1 million raised in total for the GreatEscape Foundation! We of course will be providing Team members with additional details and empowering tools, along with a GreatEscape Foundation Pledge Sheet in the near future. We will also be working hard for you to rustle up some free local press for each Team in their local areas in which to help you in your noble endeavors.

A Free Trip?

As an added incentive to help us help others and assist in the GreatEscape Foundation's ongoing fundraising efforts, the GreatEscape2011 Team that raises the most funds, over and above each Teams goal of US$40,000 (That's only $1.00 per kilometer in pledges!), will automatically be entered into our next scheduled event taking place over three-weeks to be determined, with their Teams entrance fee waived, win or lose GreatEscape2011!

Please Note: Although our special incentive is at least a US$20,000. value, this prize has NO cash value, it is NOT transferable, and both Teammates must participate for it to apply. The Team that raises the most funds will also have a special set of Terms & Conditions to sign to claim their free trip prize and participate in the next event.

I Have A Charity I'd Like The GreatEscape Foundation to Support?

If your charity has international appeal and fits with our well-established and long-term GreatEscape Foundation's twin humanitarian philosophies, we would be happy to consider your cause with an eye towards integrating it into our events fundraising efforts. Please contact us at: GE Foundation.

Thank you for your support and interest!

*Tax deductibility: U.S. Federal Tax Law provides deductions where "there is no significant element of personal pleasure, recreation, or vacation." You should consult your tax advisor if you have any questions. GreatEscape Foundation ID#95-4831064

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How To Get Involved

To get involved, please contact us at: GreatEscape Foundation or you may send a tax-deductible contribution to GreatEscape Foundation (ID# 954831064) and mail it to:

GreatEscape Foundation
1112 Montana Ave., Ste 384
Santa Monica, CA 90403 - USA

Want to make a contribution now online:

Thank You So Much!

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Some of Our Foundation's Noble Causes:

 
Over the past few years, we at GreatEscape Foundation have been fortunate to begin funding some special long-term development projects. Along with funding scores of micro-loans to budding entrepreneurs stuck in the poverty trap, we are pleased to have fully funded coed elementary schools in Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka through Free The Children, in Pakistan with the Central Asia Institute, and recently opened a medical clinic in Niger at a migratory center for the Tuareg people known as the Center for Nomadic Life at Tamesna, Niger being built by The Nomad Foundation.

In 2010 WE PLAN to fund and build four more coed elementary schools in Ecuador, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone and Kenya, along with a secondary girls school Kenya. We are also funding and building a 2-year school building project in Niger to open in the 2010-11 year.

We have grand plans to help the neediest in the world to help themselves through education and micro-loans.

The GreatEscape Foundation is also pleased to have given funds in the past to these worthy causes: Central Asia Institute (CAI), KIVA, Partners in Health (PIH), The Nomad Foundation, Free the Children, Global Volunteers, American Red Cross, Canadian Red Cross, Conservation International, FINCA International, Habitat for Humanity International, Global Green, ECPAT-USA, Heifer Project International, the Weingart Center, Planeterra Foundation, Juvenile Diabetes International, Lymphoma Society, World Monuments Fund, International Special Olympics, and the September 11th Families of Freedom Scholarship Fund.

During the course of our 2010 travel adventure we made many new friends along the way. We are happy to have also financially, materially, and personally supported the following organizations:

Joining Hands In India
Sunrise Children's Village in Cambodia
Salaam Baalak Trust in India
Light House Orphanage in Cambodia

For those of you that wish to make a direct contribution to a worthy group, we at the GreatEscape Foundation happily urge you to visit Kiva.org, a micro-loan group that will get your funds directly to someone who needs them!

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Sad Global Facts About: Our World

Here's Our World in a wonderful 3 minute video...I urge you to watch it!

Did You Know...

The Earth's population reached 6.5 billion on Saturday, February 25, 2006. Asia accounts for over 60% of the world population with almost 3.8 billion people. China and India alone comprise 20% and 16% respectively. Africa follows with 840 million people, 12% of the world population. Europe's 710 million people make up 11% of the world's population. North America is home to 514 million (8%), South America to 371 million (5.3%) and Oceania to roughly 60 million (.9%).

That according to UNICEF, about 25,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes. This is down from 35,000 ten years ago, and 41,000 twenty years ago. Three-fourths of the deaths are children under the age of five. WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

Today 10% of children in developing countries die before the age of five. This is down from 28% fifty years ago. WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

Famine and wars cause just 10% of hunger deaths, although these tend to be the ones you hear about most often. The majority of hunger deaths are caused by chronic malnutrition.

According to UNICEF, more than 10 million children die every year - about 30,000 per day - from avoidable, poverty-related causes. Among them are 4 million babies who will not survive the first month of life...that is ten 9/11 tragedies a day...think of the resources we could spend to stop this if we wanted to!

It is estimated that 1.2 million children per year...I'll write it again...1.2 million children each and every year, are bought, sold and trafficked into organized crime networks for sweatshop labor and prostitution--sex slavery. The Lancet, the British medical journal, estimated that 10 million children 17 and under may work in prostitution worldwide!

According to the 1996 World Food Summit, 840 million people live in the condition of chronic, persistent hunger, one-seventh of our human family. The vast majority of hungry people live in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

The sad macro facts: 73% of the world's poor have lived through a civil war; 29% live in countries dominated by revenue provided by a single natural resources; 30% live in either a bad regional neighborhood, are landlocked or are living in resource scare countries; and finally, 76% live in nations with both bad governance and weak domestic economic policies.

At least 900 million people now live in shantytowns and other makeshift settlements in cities vulnerable to disasters such as cyclones, flooding or earthquakes--those populations are growing at a rate of about 25 million a year, says said U.N. Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon.

Think about this: the whole of sub-Saharan Africa has less the GDP than Belgium!

Think about it: Civil wars are basically development in reverse, and they last on average of 60-months main characteristics are a general lack of hope due to a lack of education, too many youths without jobs and kids without parents. BTW, the typical cost of an average civil war to the countries neighbors is over $60 billion. (The moral of the story? Spend a little now on efficient, smart aid, or a lot later...a simple cost-benefit analysis!)

Think about it: Failing states, states where a civil society doesn't function well (ie: economic grow) for several reasons (see: Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan, Haiti, Chad, Sudan, etc.) cost the international community on average $100 billion dollars. Economic analysts suggest that failed states could be averted with as little as $7 billion in efficiently given aid! (The moral of the story? Maybe it is time for international interventions!)

The World Bank defines "extreme poverty" as living on less than $1 per day, and moderate poverty as less than $2 a day. It has been estimated that in 2001, 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day.

Fact: To belong to the top 1 per cent of the world's wealthiest you need more than $500,000 in assets, something that 37 million people have achieved. Adults with more than $2,200 of assets were in the top 50% of the global wealth league table, while those with more than $61,000 were in the top 10 per cent. WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

That according to the United Nations the richest 358 people on the Forbes 400 have more financial where with all than 2.3 billion others combined!

One third of deaths - some 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day - are due to poverty-related causes. That's 270 million people since 1990, the majority women and children, roughly equal to the population of the US.

Every 3.6 seconds a child dies of starvation and every 15 seconds unsafe drinking water kills a child.

That over 65% of the world's entire population have never made a a phone call in their lives!

Some 38% of the poorest of the poor, the bottom billion, live in landlocked nations. (They need good neighbors with good infrastructure to get their exports to global markets!)

One in three cigarettes smoked in the world today are smoked in China.

Today, an estimated 34–46 million others are living with HIV/AIDS. In 2003, 3 million people died and 5 million others became infected. Already, the disease has killed more than 20 million people since the 1980's. AIDS is still killing 8,000 people every day.

Tuberculosis, or TB, claims some 2 million lives across the world each year! Overall, one-third of the world's population is currently infected with the TB bacillus.

Malaria causes about 350–500 million infections in humans and approximately 2.1 million deaths annually—this represents at least one death every 30 seconds. From a mosquito bite!

While a baby girl born in Japan today can expect to live for about 85 years, a girl born at the same moment in Sierra Leone has a life expectancy of 36 years.

According to the World Bank, "fragile" countries, whose deepening poverty puts them at risk from terrorism, armed conflict and epidemic disease, have jumped to 26 from 17 since 2003.

Official U.S. foreign assistance to the least developed countries topped $27 billion in 2005.
U.S. consumer weight loss market worth $49.7 billion in 2005.

The Central African Republic may be the single most wretched country in the world: life expectancy is less than 38, and every year it falls by another six months!

The entire United Nations 2006 budget for development-related activities was $10 billion--in 2005, Chevron had profits in excess of $14 billion...ExxonMobil's were more than $36 billion!

Fact: The bottom half of the world’s adult population—or about 1.85 billion people—owns collectively only one percent of the world’s assets....whereas, the top 1 percent of the world’s adult population (about 37 million people) owns 40 percent of the world’s wealth, while top 10 percent owns 85 percent. The gap is getting bigger!

Although slavery is illegal in most of the world, an estimated 27 million people live in bondage, according to Free the Slaves, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit group working to eradicate the phenomenon globally--about 10 to 20 percent of the cases she sees also involve sexual abuse and rape.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." -- Dwight Eisenhower

And Closer to Home...

The USA needs a net inflow of capital of $3 billion a day from the rest of the world to keep the economy afloat.

The United States imports and the rest of the world exports; the United States borrows and the rest of the world lends. Financial flows are so lopsided that last year America soaked up 80% of the surplus savings in the entire world.

According to research conducted by the Urban Institute, 1.9 million US seniors must choose between buying food and buying needed medicine.

31 million Americans were food insecure, meaning they were either hungry or unsure of where their next meal would come from. 12 million of these Americans were children.

The nation’s official 2006 poverty rate remained statistically unchanged at 12.6 percent, 37 million people. That's 5.4 million more than in 2000--a 17% increase. Think about that...one of every 12 residents in AMERICA are living hand-to-mouth!?

An estimated 3.6 million Californians are infected with the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. Most of those who are infected don’t know it!

The latest data from the National Center for Health Statistics show that 30% of US adults aged 20 and older are obese. The percentage of young people who are overweight has more than tripled since 1980.

30% to 40% of all cancers are directly linked to the foods we eat, the exercise we get and how well we watch our weight.

In 1993, at the time of President Clinton's doomed health care reform proposal, the nation's medical system made up 13.7% of its GDP, sixteen years later, in 2005, health care spending exceeded $2 trillion, amounting to a full 16% of the nation's GDP--compared to 9.7% in Germany and 9.5% in France.

US residents without health insurance increased by 1.3 million in 2005 to a record 46.6 million individuals, or 15.9% of the US population!

The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year--or close to four hundred billion dollars--on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita.

A 2003 Pew poll found that 72 percent of Americans favored government-guaranteed health insurance for all.

American life expectancy at birth ranks behind fifteen nations, all of which spend proportionately far less on health care.

Infants die at a higher rate in America each year than in 21 other countries, including Ireland and France, with black infant mortality rates projected to be three times greater than that of white infants in the year 2000.

US bankruptcy filings in 2005 rose 31.6 percent, topping 2 million. 1 in every 53 households! Half the families in bankruptcy filings have serious medical problems.

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How How to Better Understand the World

Read. Start here and empower yourself. Action will follow!

Collier, Paul (2008). The Bottom Billion.

Sachs, Jeffrey (2008). Common Wealth.

Sachs, Jeffrey (2005). The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time.

Kidder, Tracy (2003). Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World.

Smith, Stephen (2005). Ending Global Poverty: A Guide to What Works.

Diamond, Jared (2004). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Sen, Amartya (2000). Development as Freedom.

Bornstein, David (2004). How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.

Yunus, Mohammad (2003). Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty.

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 We also of course welcome your questions, comments and  queries, so please feel free to Contact Us anytime...