RESULTS Successes Acknowledged!

Thank You from Bill and Melinda Gates

What are you thankful for this season? Without a doubt, we are all thankful for our amazing grassroots advocates, without whom important programs that save lives would not exist.  We’re not the only ones who are thankful! As a token of Bill and Melinda Gates’ thanks for your extraordinary work to ensure a robust GAVI Alliance, they sent us this plaque to commemorate a successful pledging conference in June. June 2011 was an important milestone in RESULTS grassroots history and our dedication to child survival.

Grassroots volunteers all across the US were instrumental in securing over 71 media hits and 62 congressional signatures on the Rep. Van Hollen letter to USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah. This effort helped secure a  U.S  Government pledge of $450 million over three years to the GAVI Alliance.  All said and done, the GAVI Alliance superseded its funding target of $3.7 billion and raised $4.3 billion. With this funding, GAVI will support immunizations for more than 250 million of the world’s poorest children and prevent 4 million premature deaths. Though you deserve a plaque far larger than this, your work is not yet done. Your advocacy will continue to be vital in ensuring that the U.S. lives up to its pledge to immunize millions of children against leading causes of death in the developing world. But for now, we should be proud of our work, and thankful for the impact these lifesaving programs will make. 

(Plaque pictured on the left has a list of the major donors at the pledging conference, a graph showing the scale up of lives saved, a note from Bill and Melinda thanking RESULTS, and vials of the rotavirus, pneumococcal and DTP vaccines)

Thank you from Carol Bellamy of the Global Partnership for Education

You can download a copy of the letter but below is an excerpt. Congratulations on your great work. We did not get the amount we were looking for, but we did get the U.S. to contribute to the GPE for the first time – a breakthrough. We will build on this in 2012!

“Dear RESULTS Partners,   

I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to you for your support for the Global Partnership for Education’s first-ever pledging conference in Copenhagen on 8 November. It was a pivotal moment for the global effort to assure a quality education for all children. With representatives from 52 countries from around the globe, the conference sent a loud and clear message that education is the key to unlocking the development potential of all countries. This level of support and engagement was made possible by the tireless efforts of RESULTS grassroots partners in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia, which lead to increased leadership and political resources from these governments to achieve quality education for all.”