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I started RESULTS, a citizens' lobbying organization dedicated to creating the political will to end hunger, as a result of this gap between the studies calling for the political will to end hunger and my experience with these 7,000 students. When things got difficult, the experience with these 7,000 students served as part of my foundation, part of my grounding. It gave me a direct sense of what needed to be done. We had to find a way to generate political will. We had to teach the skills of democracy and acquaint people with their government, starting at the most basic level.

That was in 1980. Due largely to RESULTS' leadership, U.S. government funding for UNICEF and the Child Survival Fund (a foreign-assistance program focused on basic health measures like child vaccinations) has grown from $42 million per year in 1984 to about $455 million a year in 2000. Child death rates have declined from 41,000 a day in 1986 to 32,000 today, saving some three million young lives each year. This is real progress, but the child death rates are still scandalously high.

Michael Rubinstein, a RESULTS volunteer leader in Maryland, tells of his first RESULTS International Conference in 1986 and provides a glimpse into how this shift in priority and funding occurred. He describes a Congressional staff panel on increasing the Child Survival Fund from $25 million to $75 million.

'The Hill staffers told us we shouldn't ask for more money,' Michael remembered. 'We were lucky, they told us, if we got a slight increase. If we asked for the full $50 million increase, we would just alienate members of Congress.

'The message that the Hill staffers shared with us had no impact whatsoever,' Michael continued. 'The 300 RESULTS partners in the room listened carefully, asked questions, were polite and respectful-even enthusiastic. But they were completely unmoved by the discouragement. Nothing was going to stand in the way of our vision. Children were dying and they needed vaccines. The politics were irrelevant. I have seen too many starry-eyed, pie-in-the-sky dreamers. But this was different. Behind the vision was a hard-nosed practicality. . '

Michael saw the hard-nosed practicality when one of the RESULTS staff asked him to call the local television affiliates to try to get a viewer commentary. 'I said, 'Gulp,'' Michael recalled. 'I was familiar with the idea. I remembered an episode of 'All in the Family'in which Archie did a viewer commentary opposing gun control. It had never occurred to me that I could do such a thing. The idea terrified me. It took me about 3 days to screw up the courage before I called the three stations. Amazingly, the NBC affiliate accepted my script.'

Michael faced his next challenge, looking presentable. 'At the time,' Michael recalled, 'I was never much into looking good. I was young and never took myself very seriously. I looked into my closet and found a navy blue blazer that had been lent to me by an acquaintance in college. He had never come back to pick it up. I noticed that I had a pair of blue pants that matched the color perfectly. I now had a suit. I had just gotten a haircut for the occasion, cutting my 'Jewish Afro' really short. I put on a necktie, a very rare occurrence for me, and made myself look as good as I could.

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