Friday, September 19, 2008

What ever happened to the Perpetual Education Fund?



Why is it that all the information put out about the perpetual education fund seems to be between 3 years and 7 years old?

I think it's an exciting program, and would love to read stories of those who have benefitted from it, but the PEF website has stories from 2001 (when the program started).

From what I can find, there were a couple stories in a recent Church News.
Wikipedia has some potential statistics, but citations to the Deseret News are not archived, so you get today's stories, rather than PEF statistics.
A 2004 pdf sheet based on a meeting with Elder Richard Cook is informative.

Comments on a blog posted December 31, 2007 cite trouble with PEF in Peru.

Elder Carmack gave a speech at the BYU Kennedy Center that cites some success stories (see from 27:20 on).

And in the Deseret News, some goofball indignantly proclaims, "My wife and I agree: No more settlement meetings until we see some figures." I think he's trying to pass himself off as a Mormon. (The story he is commenting on is the one from the Church News, above.)

I'd love more information about the program. I'd love to hear of its successes and failures. I'd love to hear about trouble in Peru, success in Guatemala, entry into new countries, etc. I'd love to hear stories from participants, Bishops, and General Authorities. But mostly, I hear nothing. If I cannot get daily updates, how about monthly, or even yearly? Biannually?

At the very least, couldn't some intern just update the website with stories that are less than seven years old?!

1 comment:

  1. I wrote that blog post back in Dec 07.

    I had a commenter complain about the program, so I emailed and then called a representative. The program is going strong, with a high repayment rate. Peru had/has one of the lower repayment rates in the world, and that is what my commenter and I were discussing.

    The PEF has a corpus of donated funds. Along with the repayment funds, it is the earnings from the corpus that are loaned out. This ensures that the fund is truly perpetual and the program can continue.

    As far as updates are concerned, I'd suggest emailing the PEF folks directly. That's how I got all the details I did about Peru. I think I posted the name and email of the person that responded in the comments to my post. If not, the PEF website has an email feature - that's what I did initially.

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