TALKING POINTS

• Rancho Feliz Charitable Foundation is a grass roots, volunteer-based, multi-national, secular, non-profit 501(c)3 organization, serving in the border community of Agua Prieta, Sonora, México, a mere four-hour drive from Phoenix, Arizona.
• Over the past four decades, Rancho Feliz Charitable Foundation has evolved from a borderland charity handing out food and supplies into something more revolutionary — one that replaces pity with purpose and handouts with human connection.
• In a pragmatic way, Rancho Feliz aims to make a dent in the border crisis. Providing people with opportunities, not welfare, allows them to live with dignity in their own country, eliminating the need to migrate illegally into the United States.
• Through Rancho Feliz, Gil seeks to address two prongs of poverty at once — the material poverty many Mexicans feel and the spiritual poverty that plagues the affluent on this side of the border.
• Through its Vecinos Dignos (Worthy Neighbors) subdivision, families apply to earn their homes, quite literally. Under a rent-to-own agreement, the tenants make no-interest payments and donate volunteer hours, and their children are offered scholarships to attend bilingual schools. Gil calls this “reciprocal giving” — a loop in which both giver and receiver are empowered. No handouts or hierarchy, just a system that nurtures self-reliance and change.
• Rancho Feliz advocates the paradoxical concept of “Enlightened Self-Interest.” Lasting changes in how we treat each other as a species will only occur when people truly believe that they can best serve themselves by serving others. It is “transactional.” It is “conditional.” We must appeal to the evolutionary greed and base self-interest of our current human condition.
• Charity is easy to understand at Rancho Feliz. We call it “enlightened self-interest.” It means looking out for yourself by looking out for others.
• “Spirit” or “higher power” shares its secrets and its magic with those who have a higher purpose.
• At Rancho Feliz we are not seeking the meaning of life – we are seeking how to best enjoy the journey.
• With our help – their lives are being changed forever. By allowing us to help – our lives are being changed forever.
• Meaninglessness in life does not come from pain – meaninglessness in life comes from too much.
• Gifts make slaves. There is such a thing as Misguided Compassion.
• Education is the only thing we can give these children that someone can’t take away. Education is the key that will unlock their inherited prisons of ignorance. Education provides windows through which these children will see a much larger world – a world full of opportunity, possibilities and imagination.
• What is the endgame of technology? Comfort & convenience. Have you ever considered that the comforts and conveniences provided by technology satisfy only those wants and desires that they themselves create.
• Charity is a tricky business. That is why all Rancho Feliz “Guardian Warrior” programs are meticulously designed to nurture and liberate human potential – not stifle it through well-intentioned, though misguided, charitable handouts.
• There is no higher religion than human service. It releases us from the bondage of “self.”
• At Rancho Feliz we do not serve the less fortunate out of guilt or obligation – nor do we feel superior or separate. Rather we understand that our own liberation is inextricably bound with those we serve.
• We feed their stomachs and they feed our souls. Since inception in 1987, the Rancho Feliz Charitable Foundation has hosted over 28,000 American volunteers at its facility in the border town of Agua Prieta, México, as well as investing over $20 million in the local economy and infrastructure.
• Service to others is how I recognize myself. It’s how I choose to feel that I matter in this world. In that respect it’s quite selfish. I believe that if we peeled away the layers off of most of our actions this underlying “selfish” truth would appear.

TIMELY TIE-INS

January

• Poverty Awareness Month
• Civil Rights Day – 9

February

• Ethnic Equality Month
• World Day of Social Justice – 20
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PRAISE

“Hope on the Border is a stunning blueprint for lasting, meaningful change. To reinforce the poignancy of this transformative account, nearly every page explodes in color, bursting with photos that illustrate how improving living standards even in one small village can have far-reaching effects…Ultimately, Gillenwater suggests that service to others is ‘the one form of social capital that never loses value in the marketplace of human happiness.’”
–PW Booklife

“Intense and compelling…Hope on the Border celebrates the empowering successes of Rancho Feliz and calls for pragmatic empathy and strategic alliances in reevaluating immigration policies.”
—Foreword Reviews

“Hope on the Border delivers an instructive, visually engaging account of an American philanthropist’s decades of charitable work on behalf of Mexicans….Readers will find inspiration in the charity’s many programs and accomplishments. The book is an excellent source of first-hand information about the border and a rousing call for hope.”
–BlueInk Review

“Hope on the Border is a call to conscience. Gillenwater offers readers a rare gift: the opportunity to see the border not as a place of division, but as a landscape of shared humanity….A masterpiece of empathy and vision. Part photojournalism, part personal odyssey, and entirely transformative, Hope on the Border reminds us that the most powerful walls we can dismantle are the ones within ourselves.”
–Literary Titan