Issue link: http://latinschool.uberflip.com/i/134761
Michael Trainer '94 is someone who feels compelled to take action when he sees problems around in the world. He first encountered the kind of extreme poverty that he is now committed to eradicating after graduating from Bowdoin College and moving to Sri Lanka as a Fulbright Scholar. "It was beyond my previous conception," he said. Following his two-year stay in Sri Lanka, Trainer returned to the United States and "I saw in his teaching someone who was committed to excellence. He didn't let anyone get by with anything less." started teaching. But when the 2004 tsunami devastated parts of South and South East Asia, Trainer realized that his heart was not in the classroom. "I realized that while I loved teaching, I wanted to work on a larger scale," Trainer said, "beyond the four walls of a classroom." He went back to graduate school at Columbia University and received a fellowship for a master's degree in international affairs and then returned to Sri Lanka on a grant 52 L AT I N M AGAZINE from Columbia's Earth Institute. During this trip, he had his video camera with him. "I saw video as something that could be a part of a revolution," he said. He created his own company and spearheaded a number of social media initiatives for various nongovernmental and charitable organizations, including the Carter Center in Atlanta and Nobel Peace prize-winning Wangari Maathai's Greenbelt movement in Kenya. In 2010, Trainer was approached by Bobby Bailey, co-founder of the Global Poverty Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating young people about the harsh realities of global poverty and leveraging that knowledge to end poverty around the world. Today, Trainer is the U.S. country director for the organization. The work that he has been most proud of for the GPP so far has been in his role as executive producer and creative director of the Global Citizen Festival – a music event that took place on the Great Lawn in Central Park in September 2012. Starting with a budget of zero, Trainer and his team of two put together a concert that included headliners like Neil Young, the Black Keys and the Foo Fighters. More than 60,000 people attended, 15 million people watched the festival live, and it raised about $1.3 billion in commitments for programs serving the world's poor. More than six months later, Trainer still sounds slightly surprised that the festival actually happened. The fact that it did, he