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Imagine a world where everything you treasure - your family, your home, your life - was always threatened. Where a child's only hope for tomorrow was simply to see tomorrow. Where the only reward for your constant work was survival.

That's not just a frightening fantasy. That's reality for two-thirds of the world's women. From Ghana to Guatemala, women struggle, mostly without help, to keep themselves and their families alive. Women produce 80 percent of the developing world's food and bear most of the responsibility for their families' animals and crops. Yet women own less that 1 percent of the world's land and make up 70 percent of the poor. Of the billion or more chronically undernourished people, women and children are the majority.

Overlooked by government programs and denied education, rural women face a cycle of poverty, hunger and despair. Without help, many flee to overcrowded cities, where they often resort to prostitution to stay alive. Others work ceaselessly yet watch helplessly as death - too often a welcome relief from starvation - steals their children.

But there is a way out. In a world where too many women are powerless to change their circumstances, you have the power - through your endowment - to change the lives of these women and the future of their great-granddaughters.

Begun in 1990, Heifer International's Women in Livestock Development (WiLD) program provides women with the resources and skills they need to overcome hunger and poverty and achieve self-reliance. Through more than 60 WiLD programs, HI supplies women worldwide with livestock, which provide meat, milk, eggs, wool, manure and other products that improve diet and income and help small-scale farm families use their tiny plots of land. WiLD training helps women work together to overcome social and cultural barriers and develop self-confidence and leadership skills. And WiLD workshops help men understand the need to support their wives in their struggle for improvement. In return, WiLD partners "pass on the gift" by donating one or more of their animals' offspring to another woman in need.

"I want to send the women of the world a message that if we all get together and work hard, perhaps poverty can be ended," said a young illiterate Thai mother who, because of the gift of a water buffalo, now can feed her family and send her children to school.

By starting your own, or contributing to an existing WiLD endowment, you are providing hope for a woman and her family. Join hands with this young mother and thousands of other women who are trying so hard to make a better life for themselves and their families.