Archive for April 9th, 2012
Studying charity
We find at the Chreda Foundation (a non-profit that I mention here from time to time, and of which I am proud to be a Trustee) that one of the biggest challenges is to be noticed and to get people talking about the work that we are doing. Everything else flows from that – from raising funds, to persuading others to participate in our activities, to finding worthy recipients of our support. Publicity is key to every aspect of charitable work such as ours. Hence my use of this channel to ‘plug’ our charity whenever appropriate. So I was fascinated by a snippet of news I came across recently.
The Christian-based non-profit Habitat for Humanity Intl, which “seeks to eliminate poverty, housing and homelessness from the world and make decent shelter a matter of conscience and action worldwide” has an affiliate organisation known as “Almost Heaven Habitat for Humanity”, which operates on ‘home turf’, so to speak – it specialises in eliminating substandard housing and providing decent homes to low-income American citizens. One area where it is very active is West Virginia.
According to a news item in the Portland Press Herald yesterday almost 60 students from Casco Bay High School in Portland, Maine, are spending this week living in the charity’s facility in Almost Heaven, West Virginia, studying its operations, taking photographs and interviewing residents in its affordable-housing projects, with a view to creating multimedia oral histories about it. They have been learning all about the region for several months, and have funded their trip through fundraising efforts, family and corporate donations, and grants, raising almost $40,000.
This seems a superb way of providing publicity for the charity and education for the children, while encouraging them to take an interest in altruistic activities. I don’t know whether it was the school or the charity that originally proposed this, but hats off to them both for an excellent initiative. I’m always keen to see young people becoming involved in the community, and this is a great example. I hope we’ll see lots more of this type of activity in the future.
