Media Coverage

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal
Million-dollar prize goes to priest
Money to help expand network of literacy centers for poor of India
Nov. 5, 2005

Father Trevor Miranda, who reaches out to India's desperately poor with faith-fueled pragmatism, momentarily lost his broad smile when the enormity of what was about to happen to him in Milwaukee overwhelmed his customary composure Friday.

One million dollars can do that to man. Even to a Jesuit priest. Even during an interview long after the initial shock has worn off.

When he can staff a literacy center serving 25 children amid urban shanties or impoverished rural villages for an entire year for about $650, a little money touches a lot of lives.

And a lot of money . . . that can choke one up.

It seems like a dream, but Miranda who helps others achieve what they dared not even dream will encounter a larger-than-life reality Monday night when he and his Reach Education Action Programme receive the $1 million Opus Prize at Marquette University in front of nearly 500 national and local human rights leaders, representatives of non-profit organizations, and Marquette faculty, staff and students.

Miranda, 52, has established most of his program's 450 literacy centers usually small shanty-like structures erected by a neighborhood or community within the past six years in and around his native city of Mumbai, better known to many Americans as Bombay. His goal is to reach the many children who earn money for themselves and their families by picking recyclables from dumps, working in small shops and industries, and doing other tasks.

A city of some 20 million people, Mumbai has wealth alongside great poverty and a literacy rate Miranda says is only 53%.

Through a pre-school program and one for older children, he tries to motivate and prepare children and their families to plug them into the government education system before they get too old to reach for a better life. Of the 10,000 students who spend four hours a day in the centers, some 2,000 transition into first grade and about 300 older ones are able to enter public grade schools at the fifth-grade level each year.

Keeping these children interested in learning is one of the greatest challenges when the lure of earning money always beckons at the door.

"You have to make it very exciting, very interesting," Miranda said.

In the process, his small organization also empowers and uplifts impoverished young women who already have some high school education by giving them six months of teacher training and having them teach at the literacy centers. It runs training centers for women, giving them skills for making and managing money and establishing some 150 small self-help groups where they gain confidence to act as what he terms "agents of social change."

Miranda's organization does all of this for about $575,000 a year, seeking government grants, philanthropic donations and other funds.

By investing the $1 million, Miranda hopes to earn about $80,000 a year to fund or open 180 new literacy centers a year.

The award is given by the Opus Prize Foundation established by The Opus Group, a $1.4 billion commercial real estate development company based in a Minneapolis suburb. In its second year, the prize is given to individuals or organizations that foster personal responsibility and independence while using innovative strategies for solving deeply rooted problems in their communities poverty, hunger, illiteracy or disease.

A different Catholic university selects the panel of judges that picks the winner each year, and this is Marquette's year.

Two organizations and individuals will each receive $100,000 awards Monday: Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos (Our Little Brothers and Sisters), which serves orphaned and abandoned children in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Juliana Akinyi Otieno, a pediatrician in eastern Kenya, where 20% of the children who are born die before age 5. Until recently, she was the only pediatrician serving a population of 300,000.