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RESTORATIVE: Abraham has helped
raise more than $1 million for a U.N. fund.
UNFPA/Alvaro Serrano |
lois abraham looked $34
million in the eye and decided to think small.
Thirty-four million was the amount the federal government
slashed in 2001 from its support of the United Nations
Population Fund (UNFPA), which provides prenatal care,
family planning and HIV-prevention programs around the
world. Abraham saw the budget cut as an affront to the
progress of women and set out to recoup the money—one
dollar at a time.
No stranger to challenges, Abraham in 1972 was one
of the first women to be hired by a large law firm in
Phoenix. She became a pioneer in technology litigation,
working with Intel, Sun, Apple and IBM. So it was no
surprise that she turned to technology in her campaign
to replace the UNFPA funds. She guessed that at least
34 million people in the world would donate a dollar
toward women in developing countries if they could be
mobilized via the Internet.
Abraham began one August morning in 2001 by contacting
40 of her friends, mostly other women lawyers. “I
did not have one person who did not say, ‘I’m
in,’” she recalls. They in turn agreed to
e-mail their friends asking them to send $1 to a special
fund set up by the U.N. As Abraham puts it, geometric
progress soon took over, and the fund mushroomed.
Early momentum came from endorsements by columnist
Molly Ivins, the Sierra Club and several national women’s
organizations. By May 2002, the campaign had raised
more than one million dollars.
Abraham traveled to Timor-Leste and Nicaragua to see
the UNFPA in action. What she observed—rural hospitals
routinely treating patients with no beds, for example—moved
her. “I learned things that astonished me about
the courage and needs of the people,” she says.
Semi-retired, Abraham splits her time between Taos,
N.M., San Francisco and Western Australia, where she
and her husband, Richard, ’51, MS ’54, run
a winery. She continues to practice law as a mediator
and spends several hours a day promoting the UNFPA fund-raising
effort.
The running tally on the website, www.34millionfriends.org,
was at $1,786,564 as of January 6. It got a boost when
O, The Oprah Magazine profiled Abraham and
co-activist Jane Roberts in the November 2003 issue.
Abraham is optimistic that the money will continue
to flow in. “A dollar anyone can do,” she
says.
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