NEW YORK, Sept. 24, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- "How can we design our world to create more opportunity and more equality?" The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting, themed Designing for Impact, asks this question. This is the ideal venue for Ubuntu Education Fund to launch the U.ME.WE campaign.

U.ME.WE is Ubuntu's most ambitious CGI Commitment to date. Each CGI member makes a Commitment to Action—a concrete plan to address a major global challenge. U.ME.WE, based on Ubuntu's bedrock concept of the interconnectedness of all human beings, is a campaign strategically designed for impact and will help Ubuntu fulfill its mission to transform the lives of 2,000 vulnerable children and their families in the townships of Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

When Jacob Lief and Banks Gwaxula founded Ubuntu in 1999, they quickly realized that a traditional development model would not have the capacity to address the complex challenges their community faces. Over the last 13 years, they built a context-driven community institution, redefining the concept of "going to scale." Rather than expand geographically, Ubuntu concentrates its services deeply on a single community.

"We believe that Ubuntu is one of the most ambitious social projects on the continent of Africa," says President and Founder Jacob Lief, "and U.ME.WE is the innovative and essential fundraising model to realize those ambitions."

To most effectively stabilize families, reduce violence and neglect, and treat disease and poverty, Ubuntu established an integrated system of comprehensive health, household stability, and educational services. This strategy ensures that a child, after several years with Ubuntu, is equipped to succeed in the worlds of education and employment.

The U.ME.WE campaign aims to raise $25 million over three years but it is not just any fundraising campaign. "U.ME.WE is crafted to both reflect and further our passionate commitment to stay with our children literally from cradle to career, and to allow us to plan our work in a sustainable way, knowing that we have the resources to follow through," says Lief. "It also gives our donors the rare opportunity to be part of a lasting change. When you join U.ME.WE, you are doing more than throwing money at a problem: you have the opportunity to watch the difference it makes."

Ubuntu's patron Archbishop Desmond Tutu says this about the spirit of the U.ME.WE campaign: "Ubuntu Education Fund is reaching people who count, saying, 'You are not helpless, you are not ciphers that can be manipulated. You are people who can prepare your own thoughts.'"

The CGI Annual Meeting asks, "How are we designing our lives, our environments, and the global systems we employ in order to impact the challenges at hand?" Ubuntu's answer to this question is the U.ME.WE campaign: a strategy to foster lasting, meaningful, transformative change in one corner at the very tip of the African continent, and a model of innovative fundraising for other organizations to replicate.

Media contact: Travis Randall
646-827-1190
travis@ubuntufund.org

For more information, please visit Ubuntu's website: www.ubuntufund.org.
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SOURCE Ubuntu Education Fund