Kurt Johnson

Susanne and I are tentatively planning to go to Vietnam May 5-17. Please email me if you could meet up with us or have any travel tips. We don’t have any specific in-country schedule yet.

I have been slacking on putting up a post about the India GIP visit to the Parikrma Center for Learning. In my defense I’m planning to coauthor an article about it for the Wharton Journal in a couple of weeks and can post that when it’s done.

In a nutshell the Parikrma schools are nonprofit schools in Bangalore that pick children from the slums who, based on interviews with the family, are virtually guaranteed to not attend the public schools due to poverty or social problems. The program takes kids who have the absolute least likelihood of getting an education and put them into private (donor funded) schools. I’ll write more about the outcomes later but in short they are amazing - the kids are well educated and probably the best behaved 1st-5th graders that I have ever seen at any school, bar none (especially impressive if you’ve spent any time in US schools that serve the same relative demographic).

My photos from the school we visited are here. The students from Wharton who visited with me are in the process of donating several thousand dollars to Parikrma and in thinking about this I figured out that on a dollars per week basis my cost to attend Wharton as an individual (tuition and books only) is roughly the same as the cost to support the entire school we visited (well over 100 students). I need to confirm the exact numbers for Parikrma but in effect both programs are burning about $5,000/ month.

I’m pretty libertarian and absolutely support every individual’s right to spend their money on what they want; having said that it’s very difficult to see myself donating to an institution like Wharton (or any other US university) when the impact of the same contribution is going to be so much higher at Parikrma or Kiva.org.
UPenn is sitting on something like four billion dollars; exactly what sort of tangible impact is my donation going to have? If I give $5,000 is that money going to be put to work upgrading some administrative VP’s airline ticket on a trip to a conference? Maybe it will buy a couple of new plasma screens for Huntsman Hall….or I could provide a watershed intervention to a couple dozen kids who would otherwise never learn to read.

No doubt someday shortly after graduation I’ll get to continue this discussion with some poor freshman in UPenn’s fundraising call center.

…is posting another photo. This man kind of snuck up on me; if I had to do it over again I would have tried using flash since the shadows were so harsh.

Full res image is also available here. Taken at 50mm/F4 ISO 800, 1/8000 (like I said, he snuck up on me…I turned around from a fairly dark store and didn’t have a chance to adjust settings)