‘At the end of 10 years, we’ve got $400 million recirculating with the poor people.’

A small group of Valley men and women who believe they can help the world’s hungry through individual effort, or at least feel compelled to try, get together on the last Monday of each month to engage in an exercise of political will.

This week they launched a campaign to warm their representatives in Washington to the Self Sufficiency for the Poor Act of 1987, a bill their organization has written and hopes to have introduced before the House of Representatives today.

They belong to the Valley chapter of RESULTS, a grass-roots lobbying organization started several years ago by a Tarzana man who has since moved to Washington to run the group’s national office.

RESULTS has 67 chapters around the country, including six in the Los Angeles area, and 12 in Canada, England and Australia.

The organization lobbies for legislation and government policies that its leaders consider helpful to the world’s poorest people.

Its members also write letters to their newspapers to draw attention to events such as the recent release of UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children Report.

That document, which received passing press coverage, reported that 280,000 children die each week from hunger and hunger-related illnesses.

Figures like that can create a deadening pressure on one’s conscience.

So RESULTS breaks its assault on world hunger into simple tasks.

The task Monday evening was to write to Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) urging him to sponsor the RESULTS bill in the Senate.

Eleven people reported for duty, forming a circle on couches and lounge chairs in a small room of the Hillel House on Burbank Boulevard in North Hollywood.

Their leader, Richard Hilton, who described himself as an actor-singer and free-lance word processor, summarized the bill, which, he said, would not add to the foreign aid budget.

Instead, it would require the recipients of U.S. economic aid to divert 10% of their grants from large projects such as bridges into small loans to large numbers of people who earn $250 or less a year.

“The best method for making resources available to the poor is to make them available to the poor people directly,” another member, Warren Haskel, said, explaining the disarmingly simple theory.

Haskel said that the bill is modeled after the policies of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which has made 200,000 small loans to the very poor and has collected on 98% of them.

Michelle Forner, a young woman sitting to Hilton’s left, said the loans could be as small as $1. She gave an example of a woman who borrowed that much to prime a business selling ribbons door-to-door.

Hilton played a videotape showing how several impoverished farmers in the drought-stricken sub-Sahara region became self-sufficient using loans to build concrete wells and ox-powered irrigation systems.

“Isn’t that great?” Hilton said when the video was over. “I just love that. There are so many things--the shovels, the ox--that somebody might get a loan to buy.”

Then Hilton reviewed the nine major points of the bill.

“OK, is anybody completely lost?” he asked.

A couple of people said they were confused about where the 10% came from and who would pay it back.

Hilton passed out copies of an illustration. It showed the money emerging from the U. S. Capitol in a broad swath. The bulk of the swath flowed into a picture of a bridge (the projects). A small slice flowed away toward a list of names such as UNICEF, the Peace Corps and World Vision.

Small arrows pointed from those names toward pictographs of people plowing fields, drawing water from a well and listening to a teacher. They represented the poor using the loans.

“Does anybody feel immeasurably helped by seeing a visual?” Hilton asked.

Not everyone did. So Dorsey Lawson, one of RESULTS’ three paid staff members stepped in to help clear it up.

She said that the 10% would be paid into a loan fund over 10 years at 1% by the country receiving the aid. Then the field agencies would loan from that fund to the poor at the going interest rate. Upon repayment, the money would be loaned again, she said.

“At the end of 10 years, we’ve got $400 million recirculating with the poor people,” she said with a smile.

Next, everyone assembled into groups of two to memorize the nine points.

At last it was time to write.

“No Dear Als,” Hilton said.

“Why not?” a young woman asked. “He calls me Susan when he writes me back.”

For the next 20 minutes, only the scratching of pens could be heard.

When the letters were all sealed in envelopes, Hilton reminded everyone to recruit someone else to write a letter.

Forner reviewed the technique for getting friends to write letters they had practiced the previous month:

“Hey, how’s the weather? Have you heard about hunger?” she said.

The last piece of business was to get volunteers to call congressmen.

Hilton said the calls were necessary, even though most of the local representatives could be expected to support the bill.

“They get so many things across their desks every day that they need someone like us to help them know what’s important,” he said.

Hey, how’s the weather?