Making a difference
Former Dean of Episcopal Divinity School and parish priest, Bill Rankin, is among 70 individuals over the age of 60 named 2008 Purpose Prize Fellows for their willingness to take on society's biggest challenges in the second half of their lives. The fellows are selected by Civic Ventures, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco that works to expand the social contributions of older Americans. According to the Marin, California Independent Journal.
"Purpose Prize Fellows such as Bill Rankin show that experience and innovation can go hand in hand, that inventiveness is not the sole province of the young," said Marc Freedman, co-founder of the Purpose Prize program and author of "Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life."Rankin, 67, former priest at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Belvedere, co-founded the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance in 2000 together with former Tiburon resident Dr. Charles Wilson. The alliance delivers human immunodeficiency virus prevention and care to people in impoverished rural areas of Africa, principally in the central African nation of Malawi.
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Rankin said he and Wilson had recently retired when they got the idea of starting the alliance after reading an article in the British medical journal, The Lancet. The two men had met when Rankin was rector at St. Stephen's church from 1983 to 1993. The Lancet article made it clear that a single $4 dose of an anti-retroviral drug given to an African mother and her newborn could significantly reduce the probability of HIV transmission from mothers to newborns."About 2,000 babies are born every day in sub-Saharan Africa to HIV-positive mothers," Rankin said, "and we thought we could save a lot of the children by getting that medication out into the villages where the people are."
For more information on GAIA click here.
H/T and more on Bill Rankin at Mark Harris' blog Preludium.
