Sunday, February 15, 2009

I'm not so great at fundraising, but here goes...

For one week during summer break ('09 or '10), our family has decided to donate our time working in an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. The program is being organized by a non-profit organization called Orphanage Outreach, which has been working with orphanages in the Dominican Republic for over ten years, ever since the program’s founder discovered the poor conditions under which these children were living. These are children who have already suffered through unfortunate circumstances in their lives, such as being the victims of abusive or irresponsible parents, or living in poverty.

The mission of Orphanage Outreach is to provide opportunities to orphaned, abandoned, and disadvantaged children. Its goals are to help the orphanage provide basic necessities, to provide a quality education, and to help the orphanages become self sufficient.

As volunteers, there are several areas in which we may be working. Our main focus will be to create summer learning camps for 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th graders learning English; art camp, drama camp, geography camp, and more. Volunteers often work on physical work projects—digging, building, painting, etc.

Each Orphanage Outreach volunteer has two significant roles—to donate important volunteer time while in the Dominican Republic, and to help raise funds necessary to fulfill Orphanage Outreach’s mission. As fund-raisers, we are helping to raise funds to not only cover our expenses, but to also provide the basic necessities at the orphanage—food, water, housing, transportation, supervision, medical and dental care, and funding for educational needs.

Program fees, orphanage donations and travel expenses will total about $5000 for the four of us to volunteer, which is our ultimate goal. If we do not raise the total funds by May, we will need to decide whether only two of us will volunteer this summer or if we will continue fundraising and all participate next summer.

If you are willing to help, please click the “chip-in” button. Or, you can make out a check to Orphanage Outreach (a tax-deductible 501-C-3 organization: U.S. federal tax id #58-2197227), and send it to me at my address so that I can forward your check onto Orphanage Outreach.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment or e-mail me at triciastamp@yahoo.com . Orphanage Outreach also has a very informative web site: http://www.orphanage-outreach.org/.

Thank you so much for reading!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a great idea, I'm going to click the link and read about the organization. -Tracy

mommy of 2 said...

This is a great idea to do together as a family! Kudos to you all!