In India, Kailash Satyarthi rescues brutally enslaved children and promotes a radical vision to end forced child labor. In Kenya, Martin Fisher and Nick Moon have introduced a low-cost manual water pump that can double the yield of a small farm. In Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus' bank has loaned billions of dollars to millions of poor families, all without collateral. In Egypt, Dina Abdel Wahab has broken through cultural taboos to create quality schools for children with disabilities. These remarkable individuals represent a new breed of entrepreneur - the social entrepreneur. Courageous, compassionate and committed to transforming society, these men and women have turned their business skills into tools for change, development and hope. For them, profit is measured not in dollars and cents, but in lives saved and dignity restored. THE NEW HEROES, a new four-hour series hosted by Robert Redford, tells 12 dramatic stories of social entrepreneurs who bring innovative, empowering solutions to intractable social problems around the world. The series airs on PBS Tuesdays, June 28-July 5, 2005. Check local listings. "What is it that makes a person a hero?" asks Redford in his introduction to THE NEW HEROES. "Is it the risk they take? Or the lives they change? There are people in the world today who are offering hope instead of despair. They are the new heroes." These new heroes are activists who bring the kinds of leadership skills, problem-solving capacity and focus on results that would inevitably lead to great success in the business world. But rather than riches, these individuals seek a better society and a more humane world. Whether they are working to provide fair labor opportunities for women, bringing electricity to rural families, introducing affordable cataract surgery to prevent unnecessary blindness or educating homeless children, these iconoclastic thinkers use the power of capital, business savvy and fertile imagination to help oppressed and impoverished people transform their own realities. Each story in this unique series illustrates the amazing changes that are possible when an innovative idea is coupled with optimism, a strategy for action and a passionate belief in human potential. * "Dreams of Sanctuary" (6/28)--The series begins its global exploration of social entrepreneurs with a look at those who are helping the desperate, the destitute and the determined to make a new beginning - from Moses Zulu's home and school for AIDS orphans in Zambia to Mimi Silbert's San Francisco-based Delancy Street foundation, which helps drug addicts, criminals and the homeless turn their lives around. The episode also travels to India to follow Kailash Satyarthi on a harrowing slave-camp raid, where seconds could mean the difference between life and death. Satyarthi explains his plan to abolish slavery in India through a nationwide network of child-friendly villages and a line of carpets that are made without forced labor or child slavery. * "Technology of Freedom" (6/28)--The second program turns to the work of "compassionate capitalists" who have created self-sustaining businesses to maximize human benefit, not profit. These include Martin Fisher and Nick Moon, the founders of ApproTEC, who invented an economical water pump that gives Africa's subsistence farmers a chance to make a living, and Fabio Rosa, a modern Brazilian cowboy who battles government monopolies to bring electricity to remote regions in his country. The series also returns to India to meet Govindapa Vin Kataswami - better known as Dr. V - who has applied the latest industrial techniques to make sight-saving surgery available for the poor. * "Power of Enterprise" (7/5)--The third program looks at how social entrepreneurs are working to break the cycle of poverty by empowering people to earn a living. Among the foremost of these is Muhammad Yunus, a.k.a. "the banker to the poor," whose Grameen Bank provided 3.8 billion dollars in loans to 2.4 million families in Bangladesh and inspired similar credit operations in a hundred countries. The episode also travels to the jungle city of Pucallpa, Peru, where Albina Ruiz Rios has been forming micro-enterprises to clean up garbage that is ruining the environment, contaminating water and causing disease in poor neighborhoods. And it ventures into the violence-plagued slums of Rio de Janeiro, where Maria Teresa "Tete" Leal leads the Coopa-Roca sewing cooperative, a fair labor shop that creates clothes seen on the runways of the high-fashion world. * "Power of Knowledge" (7/5)--The final episode looks at the new heroes who are working to improve lives by creating educational opportunities in societies that often leave children to fend for themselves. Among these are Sompop Janktraka, who has started a school for young Thai girls, with the goal of saving them from prostitution, and Dina Abdel Wahab, who has started schools in Egypt for that nation's once-neglected children with disabilities. The program returns once more to India, this time to Calcutta, where Inderjit Khurana has set out to bring education to children who beg in the train stations by setting up a school right on the railway platforms. Undaunted by the chronic challenges of poverty, illness, unemployment, violence and ignorance they see around them, these remarkable men and women risk their own wealth - and often their own lives - to help people empower themselves. As this series shows, these innovating activists are out to devise and implement long-term systemic change in societies riddled with inequality and inhumanity. Their hope is to create models that will be widely imitated, leading to greater and greater good. Through their vision and action, they are changing the world ... and earning their reputations as THE NEW HEROES.
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