Pangea | Giving aid around world — and watching it work

Members of Pangea know firsthand the impact their donations are having.

After spending a year planning a project to bring running water to a village in Nicaragua, the Seattle donors traveled there to see people washing from the new tap.

"You know they're benefiting. You see happy faces, you see healthy faces," said Linda Mason, a retired health-care administrator who is Pangea's board president.

Pangea was created in 2003 by a group of friends searching for a way to engage more Americans with the developing world in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Pangea, which combines education and travel with philanthropy, takes its name from the land mass on the Earth before the continents separated.

"What people really like is that you are very hands-on," Mason said. "You're not just writing a check to a larger organization that puts it into the general budget. This gets people a lot more involved."

Pangea's volunteers donate $1,000 or $2,500 a year into a pool of grant money. Its 30 members include engineers, lawyers, a teacher, health-care workers and a computer scientist.

They start by identifying an issue to work on and a country or region most in need of help.

So far, Pangea has worked in Nicaragua, Haiti, rural Mexico and sub-Saharan Africa. It has tackled issues of water access and quality, economic development and HIV/AIDS prevention and support.

The group brings in experts to help focus strategy, invites aid organizations to send proposals and decides as a group which grants to fund. It also holds education sessions that are open to the public.

Some of the grants are quite modest, such as buying a used truck for $5,000 to help villagers in Oaxaca, Mexico, carry vegetables to market. Another grant helped a group in Tanzania hold an AIDS-prevention program targeting youth from the nomadic Masai tribe.

Sydney Munger, a volunteer with a background in environment and public health, spent two weeks in a Kenyan village with one of Pangea's grantees. Mason traveled to the Masai land to meet local teenagers and see the project.

"I want people to know that there are people out there who really care about them," Mason said. "We have to believe as individuals that we're making a difference."

-- Kristi Heim