Dear Friends,
It's been thirteen months since I put together the first Ladybug Project fundraiser at a sweltering hotel in Diego Suarez, Northern Madagascar. Using borrowed internet and spending the hours staring at websites that never seemed to completely finish loading, I cashed in the bulk of my social capital in hopes that people would turn out their pockets and donate $3 to a charity project I had just created: The Ladybug Project Inc.
Cutely entitled, "Buy a Beer, Buy a Desk," the idea centered around the idea that these friends of mine - spread across the world - wouldn't mind buying me a beer...and so they shouldn't mind giving me $3 to help finance the purchase of sixty desks for a dilapidated school at which I was teaching conservation biology.
The gamble paid off, and in that first online push, I was able to raise just over $1000. Doubling that amount with personal funds, I launched The Ladybug Project Inc. with a purchase of sixty custom-built desks for the local high school, and the delivery of $250 of school supplies to a rural school in the nearby village of Mahamasina.
Unlike in movies and inspirational novels, the following year of logistics and organizational build-up was no walk in the park. As it turns out (and perhaps I should have suspected as much), starting a nonprofit organization is intensely difficult and filled with adversity. One-hundred and three pages of IRS paperwork, sleepless nights, hearing "no" after "no", and motivating others to care about education and healthcare problems occurring thousands of miles has been extraordinarily difficult.
Other's have asked why I, the Board members, and countless volunteers, keep on working when we could just donate our time and money to established causes. The answer is simple: we have been touched by the cries and problems of specific schools, of individual children, of a nurse forgotten by the government and left without funding. To turn our backs to these problems. We have been driven to help these people.
During that first fundraiser, thirteen months ago, we asked for a donation of $3 per person. This year, we've upped the ante. In an event entitled, "Take us on a movie date to Africa", we are suggesting a donation of $10 per person.
Over the next two weeks, The Ladybug Project Inc. will be running this fundraising drive in hopes of collecting $2000 which will help us jump start the process of applying to grants, seek corporate sponsorship, and hire our first employee in 8 months. We really, really appreciate your kind giving and it is our promise to you that we will build an organization with a diversified and sustainable income. Furthermore, we pledge to build an infrastructure which sustains a consistent expenditure rate that allows 85% or more of our donations to directly benefit our education and healthcare projects in Africa.
With $3 donations in 2010, we sent 850 pounds of supplies to West Africa, brought an African student to America to study English for 5 months, donated custom-built shelving units to an Equatoguinean clinic, gave 60 desks to a school in Madagascar, and even expanded to Ghana to start an HIV/AIDS health awareness program.
Imagine how much change we can effect with $10 donations in 2011!
For more information, please visit our
Facebook event page or visit our donation page!
Best regards,
Kim Reuter, Executive Director
Phone: 850-320-3237
Email: kereuter@theladybugproject.com
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