Earth Treasury Mission

The mission of Earth Treasury is

• To piggyback on OLPC's computer program in education, in order to further health, economic opportunity, human rights, and anything else in the way of sustainable development.
• To lobby the US Congress and the various state and territorial legislatures to buy into the OLPC program.
• To support all other national OLPC groups, whether part of OLPC or independent like ourselves.
• To link schools around the world, and to teach the schoolchildren how to go into sustainable international business together.

in more detail:

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is an educational program providing computers for purchase by governments, along with Free Software, Free Textbooks, and other educational content for the conventional K-12 curriculum. This is an excellent antipoverty program which by itself would have major impacts on health, economic development, and many other major global issues. But we can go much further. We need to

• Connect schools
• Support and encourage social networking among schoolchildren
• Support and encourage language learning among schoolchildren
• Rework the curriculum to make use of the computer power and human resources thus made available
• Teach the essentials of sustainable international business, including e-commerce and the true theory of Free Markets
• Recruit other partners for the children in commerce, appropriate technology, trade law, and other areas
• Provide microfinancing for such enterprises
• Integrate this with social and spiritual development programs based on the Gandhian principles of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement

Thus we can help schoolchildren work their way through secondary (and perhaps even earlier) education, making it possible for many more of them to attend school, qualify for jobs when they graduate, or create viable jobs for others. We can increase economic growth, redirect it to sustainable ends, and provide tax revenues for expanding this and other anti-poverty programs and for sustainable development in general. Unlike foreign aid and NGO programs, OLPC will become self-funding, and so will the businesses of the children.

The current globalization movement is based on several economic fallacies, chief among them that giving corporations free access to all countries, but restricting people, somehow constitutes a Free Market. The OLPC XO computer in the hands of millions, and eventually a billion or so children, creates a completely different economic situation.