Author archives: Denis Drescher

Great news: Child Need Africa has bought the house we fund-raised for and they were even able to buy it for the same price that they negotiated in January.

As a result, they can use the contingency margin that we provisioned for price increases to already start the renovations. The most pressing batch was the fencing for the plot because without a physical barrier, they would not be able to keep the materials safe that they’ll need for the rest of the renovation. The contingency margin was sufficient to buy all materials for the fencing, so the first batch of the renovation project only consists of costs for labor and the contingency margin.

Thanks to unrestricted donations and donations for our cooperation with Child Need Africa in general, we were already able to fully fund the administrative costs of the project, a batch of needs they’ll require for all other needs and thus isolated into a separate batch, and a few of the needs that will allow them to undo some damage to walls and floor of the building. €3,806, however, are still needed before they can complete the renovations. Below the full breakdown.

The needs in ...

In our effort to put our fund-raising impact on a more quantifiable basis, we have significantly reworked our website backend (the parts that aren’t so visible) and slightly adapted our fund-raising strategies. In particular the projects that we have personally vetted or helped devise according to our list of requirements on the updated About us page are now marked with a Your Siblings seal while further projects—one so far, fund-raising for the Against Malaria Foundation—are marked with a GiveWell seal, indicating that GiveWell has recommended these projects as outstanding giving opportunities. The decision to fund-raise for these charities is of course still ours; the seal merely indicates that the research that has led to our decision was conducted by GiveWell. From their About page:

GiveWell is a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give.

Unlike charity evaluators that focus solely on financials, assessing administrative or fundraising costs, we conduct in-depth research aiming to determine how much good a given program accomplishes (in terms of lives saved, lives improved, etc.) per dollar spent. Rather than try to rate as many charities as possible ...

Green Life is a Burundian organization that was established in 1997 to look after children who had to escape from their homes or lost their families entirely. These children usually live in small tight-knit groups on the streets of the larger cities where they have to beg or commit petty theft to survive. These are experiences that no adult should ever have to make but for children they are even more traumatizing.

The NPO has built the Green Village, an area with a few buildings and farm land, as a place where these children can sleep, eat, and wash. Younger children are schooled by Green Life until they are ready to attend public schools and older children can learn the basics of several practical vocations in the village. All the while Green Life also works to reunite the children with their families where this is possible.

The Green Village was built in 2012 from Your Siblings funding. Last year, we launched a project to allow Green Life to extend the village in four key areas. Their proposal requested funds for the extension of their farming program, for an extension of their dairy production, for a water tank, and for electricity ...

As a premiere this year, we were invited as charity partners to the Czequestria convention in Prague. Just as at GalaCon, we ran a charity booth (also known as table) at the convention and Czequestria organized a charity auction for our benefit—or more specifically that of the support project for Child Need Africa’s clinic in the Rubirizi District of Uganda.

Prices and wages in the Czech Republic tend to be lower than in Germany and the attendance of the convention was about one sixth of that of the last GalaCon, so we expected proceed of less than one sixth. In total, however, the attendance-adjusted gap turned out to be smaller than expected, and the auction was even proportionally more successful!

For the transfer of the auction proceeds, the bank applied an exchange rate of € 1 = Kč 28.17547 and for the transfer of the table proceeds one of € 1 = Kč 28.174. Czequestria rounded the resulting figures up for us. Please also note that the table ...

From 2010 to 2013, we’ve been supporting the Another Hope orphanage, and when our currently running fund-raisers have completed, we’ll consider helping them extend their programs further. So far we’ve supported them with a new building so that their rent budget can directly benefit the children instead, and with a guest house that now generates additional income for the orphanage, income they can spend to cover such expenses as medical bills and school fees for the children.

Another Hope has sent us the latest figures on the current extend of their service to their region of Uganda. In total, they are regularly serving 142 children with 35 children living in the orphanage.

The services they provide to those children that do not permanently live in the orphanage are many-fold. Most children are in need of bed sheets and blankets, which they provide for them; for some children they pay the school fees or provide learning materials; and often their service is one that targets the parents instead by teaching them entrepreneurship skills and management of money when they have a chance to start a small business of their own. Finally they also often protect children who are ...

At this point, the problems that Green Life faces seem rather minor to us. Since November of last year, seven former members of the Burundian organization have voiced their complaints over a form of nontransparency that they saw in the decision-making of their own organization. A preliminary legal hearing found that their claims had no legal basis. Our contact person with Green Life then explained that the members in question had been largely inactive for their whole short time as members, and that it was only due to their absence from key meetings that they were not involved in the decisions.

Corresponding with both parties involved, our impression is that Green Life’s decisions were all in the best interest of the organization and the children, and that there is no evidence of any malpractice on the side of Green Life. Our contact also assured us that the members who parted ways with Green Life had been inactive to the degree that they had held no positions whose vacancy could affect Green Life’s operations.

Nonetheless, we want to monitor the situation a while longer before we prioritize Green Life again in our fund-raising, and Green Life also needs time ...

We have great news from our clinic project in Uganda. The financial difficulties that we reported on in February are past and they are now operating fully sustainably. Now the clinic needs to build upon this foundation to expand its operations.

You can skip the background section if you have been following the developments around Child Need Africa’s project.

Background

In 2010, when the Ugandan nonprofit Child Need Africa developed the proposal for the medical clinic they wanted to build, they specifically looked for a region where the need for a medical facility was unusually great but the closest such facility far away and hard to reach due to the lacking infrastructure compounded with overwhelming poverty. Thanks to their year-long experience serving disadvantaged families with a wide array of topics of basic medical education and what medical assistance they could lend, they quickly found several such regions and finally selected one.

When the clinic was funded, built, and fully registered in 2013, they found that time had only aggravated the situation. Unfortunately that not only meant that their help was needed all the more direly but also that they would receive less money for new medicine through their cost ...

Just like last year, GalaCon 2014 has again been a resounding success for us and thus for Child Need Africa’s nonprofit clinic. Even before the convention, they already supported us by running Project GLACEON, which drove donations over the weekend.

They provided us—InC, representing Bronies for Good, and me, representing both organizations—with a booth where we could accept donations for the clinic. They also ran a silent auction throughout most of the time and had the two-day event culminate in a live auction moderated by Perry and several of GalaCon’s guests of honor.

The charity auctions yielded about three times the proceeds that we raised at the table over the weekend. You can find the breakdown below. I’ve rounded up by eight cents to facilitate processing. (I’ll pay the difference!) Of the live auction proceeds, €250 are still forthcoming as of the writing of this post. All these proceeds have been forwarded to us in full and will reach the clinic in full when the project is funded.

By the way, there are still GLACEON cards ...

Calling all musicians! Bronies for Good is organizing its fifth charity album, Shine Together, and we will be accepting submissions all summer long.

Thanks to the tremendous work of the music community, the ongoing Seeds of Kindness 3 fundraiser together with the two previous ones have raised over $100,000 from online donations alone, supporting various Your Siblings and Engineers Without Borders projects in Uganda, Burundi, and Tanzania. We incorporated a few suggestions and rule changes to make this work even better for the musicians, and we would like to ask for your help to support the outstanding work of the Against Malaria Foundation!

Soft deadline: November 22nd, 2014
Hard deadline: December 10th, 2014
Release date: December 20th, 2014

Charity status. There is no middle man. All the money donated will go directly to the Against Malaria Foundation and will only be used to purchase insecticide-treated nets. Donations will be tax-deductible in the US, Canada, and most of Western Europe. Each donation will be publicly allocated to a specific program and extensive tracking, predistribution, and postdistribution reports will be published online.

What changed. This album will operate on a pay-what-you-want basis and a free download for the album will be ...

As you might already know, we are currently prioritizing fund-raising for Child Need Africa’s medical clinic in Uganda, since that project urgently requires a permanent support project to generate the income that will be necessary for the clinic to afford medicine and qualified staff in the long run. Once the clinic has a balanced budget again, however, we wanted to return our attention to the extension project for the Green Village in Burundi.

In the interest of transparency, we want to inform you that there have been some developments within the Burundian NPO Green Life, who runs the Green Village, that we want to see resolved before we prioritize them again in our fund-raising efforts.

We have now learned that a little over a month after our last transfer of €10, 422 of the first batch of four of the extension project for the Green Village on November 13, 2013, seven of its members voiced complaints over the command structure within Green Life, which they perceived as nontransparent and as a means of excluding them from decision-making. They pressed for legal action against the four members they perceived as being in charge of the day-to-day operations of Green Life ...