The Nobelity Project, monterey media, and the Paramount Theater in Austin Texas raised $13,000 for Architecture for Humanity’s rebuilding effort in Haiti. Over 700 people attended a screening of One Peace at a Time and the three organizations dedicated all proceeds to the fund.

If you are intertested in hosting a screening to benefit Haiti please click on “Host a Screening” on this site. 

A set of triplets sat in a booth at Manuel’s Mexican Food Restaurant on Jollyville Road during the Dec. 4 premiere party for Turk Pipkin’s new film, “One Peace at a Time,” taking in the glamour and the glitz cast off by local celebrities and planning their own way to make the world a better place.
Hill Country Middle School seventh-graders Elise, Nathan and Sophie Kunik want to help build a high school in Kenya. They follow in good footsteps. Their older brother, Julian, a Westlake High School freshman, raised $5,000 in 2007 to help put electricity and water into the St. Joseph Mahiga Primary School in Kenya. Currently, formal education for children in the rural area of Africa stops at the eighth grade. The younger Kuniks want to see learning extended all the way through high school.
“Right now, their school stops after middle school,” Nathan said. “They need a high school, so we’re helping with that. Hopefully, we’re helping people get a better life.”
The triplets plan to donate part of the money they are given during their B’Nai Mitzvah in February to the Nobelity Project headed by their family friends Turk and Christy Pipkin. They want the money to go toward the building of the Kenyan high school.
“Kids in Kenya don’t have as many opportunities as we do,” Sophie said. “This school can help change that. If your education stopped after middle school, you wouldn’t be prepared for life.”
“Having an education through high school will help them go to college,” Nathan said. “So they can get better jobs when they are older,” Sophie added.
The triplets want the money they donate to go to the brick and mortar needed for high school classrooms. They hope it will also be enough to help pay to put electricity and water in the facility.
When Julian was in seventh grade, he donated most of the money he received during his Bar Mitzvah to put electricity in the Mahiga School and to help build water well for the community. Julian said he learned about the school when his mom took him to see “Nobelity,” Pipkin’s first film.
“It was such an inspiring movie,” he said. “I just really wanted to do something to help the school.”
Julian is very happy he contributed to the cause in a meaningful way, and that the Mahiga community now has a healthy water source.
“That was crucial,” he said. “Many of the kids were infected with cholera and dysentery. We also got electricity into the school and some computers, so we brought technology to the students.”
Julian hopes some day, perhaps after college, he will be able to visit the Mahiga community and see the long-term effect from the Nobelity project and contributions. Right now, he’s happy just looking at the photos his friend Pipkin brings back from his trips.
“It feels good to have done something like this – to know that you contributed to a charity that helped change kids lives.”
His younger siblings are looking forward to their own contributions to the school. They are planning to set up a Facebook page to help people understand what they are trying to accomplish. All three of the Hill Country students think charitable work is important in the world.
“It’s good for other people, but it’s good for you as well,” Sophie said. “It makes you feel better to know that other people are having a better life because you care.”
“It’s a step in ridding the world of poverty,” Nathan said. “And it makes people feel better about other people – all other people – to know that we are out there helping each other.”
To find out more about the Mahiga school in Kenya, visit Nobelity.org.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Calendar/Film?Film=oid:763475

One Peace at a Time

Year Released: 2009
Directed By: Turk Pipkin
(NR, 83 min.)

Austin-based writer, actor, and filmmaker Pipkin is the first to admit that the world’s problems are vast. No arguments there, although most of us are inclined to accept far-flung conditions such as hunger, poverty, and malnutrition as intractable and constant. Pipkin, however, believes otherwise. He believes in solutions and that problems are fixable and goals attainable. All it takes is will, desire, commitment, and money – and films such as One Peace at a Time, which exhorts viewers to step up and take action. Almost any action is good in the Pipkin playbook; pick one and “just do it,” as the slogan says. Pipkin builds on his previous documentary Nobelity, in which he speaks with Nobel Prize winners about world problems. He revisits some of their comments in One Peace at a Time, but the bulk of the documentary observes Pipkin as he traverses the world showing us a score of examples of solutions that are presently working. He observes a family-planning initiative in Thailand, the building of a community well in Ethiopia through the auspices of A Glimmer of Hope, orphanages in India run by the Miracle Foundation, the struggle to pass a cluster-munitions ban in Oslo, Wheels for Humanity’s wheelchair dissemination in Costa Rica, and housing proposals in Nepal, Kenya, and Ecuador executed by the AMD/Open Architecture Challenge. Locally, Willie Nelson comes down off a horse on his ranch to talk with Pipkin about biodiesel over a folksy game of chess and Texas Congressman Lloyd Doggett talks with the filmmaker about the sad state of the world. Pipkin organizes the film around the idea that children throughout the world should be entitled to the basic rights of water, nutrition, education, health care, opportunity, shelter, and peace. One Peace at a Time overflows with good suggestions of ways to become part of the world’s solutions and manages to do it with crisp imagery, terrific music (from the likes of Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, Explosions in the Sky, Bob Schneider, and Ben Harper), and a positive tone that neither excoriates viewers for their inactivity nor sugarcoats the predicaments. The film seeks to inspire, and that it does. However, questions inevitably arise about Pipkin’s choice to downplay any focus on American problems existing on our front doorstep. Not that comparisons should be made, but starving orphans in Bangladesh seem to trump malnourished children in Appalachia and homeless ones in Detroit. One also has to wonder about the extensive globe-trotting necessitated by the filming of One Peace at a Time and be curious about how many water wells could be dug and schoolbooks bought with the same funds used to inspire folks back on the home front. Inspiration is necessary, of course, but how much of it is needed to produce a loaf of bread? (See Special Screenings for several opportunities to see the movie with the filmmaker in attendance and “The State We’re In,” Dec. 4, for an interview.)

  Marjorie Baumgarten [2009-12-04]

Thanks to Bank of America and The Dell Foundation we are able to offer Austin area teachers and select student groups free tickets to see One Peace At  Time on the big screen.  Please contact Melissa@nobelity.org for more details. Director Turk Pipkin in attendance.