Rainn Wilson Steps Out Of The Office For Charity

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0000

When he’s not on set of NBC’s “The Office,” Rainn Wilson spends some of his time supporting the Mona Foundation.

The Kirkland-based charity helps women and children around the world. The foundation is currently working in 15 different countries.

He said, “It finds schools and orphanages and institutes that are already working, that are founded on a grassroots level in these different countries whether it’s the Amazon, Panama, Tanzania or Haiti, then provides the financial support to grow in an organic way.”

Wilson recently returned from a trip to Haiti, where the charity provides financial support to a school and its students outside Port au Prince.

Rainn Wilson’s Perfect Mona

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:00:00 -0000

Written by Elizabeth Willoughby

After various solicitations for his celebrity support and much research into where to put it, actor Rainn Wilson says he’s found the perfect charity: Mona Foundation.

“I wanted to support a place where basically every penny of a donation would go directly to make the world a better place,” he said. “The Mona Foundation does that. I wanted to support a Foundation that makes every person feel like they could make a difference in the world. Mona does that as well. It’s basically the perfect charity. Everything I discovered about what the charity did was utterly fantastic. I believe education is the most important thing in the world. It all begins and ends there. That is what the Foundation supports above all else.”

Wilson became a spokes person for Mona Foundation in 2007 and has been busying himself with awareness and fundraising ever since.

In a recent interview with NBC News, Wilson explained how the charity functions: "The Mona Foundation is a charity that supports grassroots movements towards education in developing countries. They go in very sensitively and look for things that are already working and then lend their financial support. There’s no infrastructure to it, so literally 97 percent of your money goes directly to support these initiatives.

“I think they really listen to the needs of the community that they’re supporting. There’s this school for native Indians that live in the mountains of Panama and it’s the only school of its kind that teaches in that native language. When they asked what the needs of that school were, they said, ‘Well we want to train people to teach our language.’ The people from Mona were like, ‘Really? Are you sure you don’t want running water, you don’t want desks or you don’t want to build a dormitory or something?’ and they said, ‘No, that’s what we really, really want.’ [Mona] said, ‘OK, we will raise the money to make that happen.’”

“Mona Foundation,” says its president Mahnaz Javid, “works to support people and projects that are trying to make a difference and improve their local area.”

Next on the Wilson’s agenda: a school visit in Tanzania.

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