Need a suggestion - Grant possible, $ much lower than needed
I’m throwing this out for anyone who wants to brainstorm with me.
My son David has a charity, Thunder Mission. It’s a big part of him wanting to give back to the last orphanage he was at, and where, literally, the director saved his life. David’s charity has been going for over a year now. He takes groups of US teens down to the Juarez, MX orphanage to do a weekend project and hang out in a Big Brother/Big Sister type program with the younger kids at the orphanage. David’s line is “Why change one life, when you can change two?”
This last trip had 36 people total. He hates to turn anyone down, but the problem is housing. If they stay in El Paso, they have to deal with border crossings every day and that can take hours and hours. The Juarez hotels are either a little dicey for teens or much more expensive than the US counterparts. Ideally, if the group is small enough, they can stay at the orphanage itself.
The problem is not just with David’s group either. Their are groups that come down from various Church and Civic organizations and they face the same issue…where to stay.
So, David’s big dream is to buy a piece of land near the orphanage in the village of San Agustin (outside Juarez) and build dorms and a camping facility. That way other groups could stay. It could also be a place for the inner city orphanages to “camp” during the weekends. Some of the kids in the inner city orphanages can never go outside because the streets are too dangerous where they are. The project in total will probably cost about $100,000.
So - here’s the question. David was just given a grant possibility of $5,000. He could “blow it” on a smaller project, but he really wants to buy land and start building. Land itself is probably $20,000 - $40,000. What can he do with $5,000?
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A few random ideas:
-Use the money to fund an Internet biz where earnings would go to the project (ie: FeedYourFamilyFeedTheWorld.com)
-Buy materials so the children at the orphanage could build something nice to sell in order to buy the land (This would probably be against child work but it could work)
-Make a video about the orphanage and ask for donations, the video could go viral if well executed. Although I don’t know how much donations it could get
-Hire specialists in some areas, make webcasts and then sell the webinars online
-Organize a party and the earnings would go to the project
-Make a contest, sell numbers for the prize. The prize itself could be made by the children.
Great ideas! I’ll run them by David.
Has he talked with any of the other groups that send people into the area, maybe he could form some type of partnership. If a partnership is out of the question, contacts within a church group could help a video, website, or other business opportunity grow that much faster. Basically maximize the resources of other networks that have the similar goals. The church is one of the largest networks and is also one of the most likely to help other people. Sounds to me like a perfect match. If he goes the website route he’ll need this network to help bump his click rate up and form links to his website in order to gain the recognition of the search engines. Web businesses are great if their not buried under a 100,000 other similar businesses.
Great suggestions! I briefly mentioned it to David. He has contacts at a couple of local churches where he has gone to speak. We’ll have to put together a game plan on that.
Update!
I am so grateful to the very generous participants at my Advanced Pre-emptive Tax Strategy workshop in San Diego 3/7 - 3/9. They contributed $40,000 to David’s charity!
We are moving forward on the goal he has of creating a facility in Juarez, MX to provide a safe place for groups that come down from the States to help the orphanages and other disadvantaged people in the city AND a recreational place for the children of the over 200 orphanages there.
There is mind-mapping software online. Has anyone ever used it?
I’m more of paper & pencil girl myself, but it sounds perfect for brain-storming big ideas.
One idea I had was using currency in one’s favor. When we lived in Germany, summer camp could be a three week outting.
So.. first idea is volunteer or international visitor groups paying in Euros.
Second idea: Gather community-minded high net worth individuals together online to be surveyed regularly, and David’s charity earns the revenue.
Feedback from the $1mil - $10mil crowd, or the $10mil+ crowd is probably hard to capture, and ought to be worth something, don’t ‘cha think?
The second idea really got me going.
One of my clients has a very successful CME (certified medical education) company. One of their strategic advantages are the “think tanks” that they regularly sponsor. They come up with a clinical question (not quite sure how to phrase it) and then the pro’s and con’s are discussed. Non clinical practitioners (the theory guys) explain how it SHOULD be done, people in the field discuss how it IS done. All the data is compiled and everybody who participated gets credit in prestigious mags when they publish results.
Basically my client’s company has facilitated fantastic learning, and as a result gotten great press in their niche market.
What you’ve suggested here, luckystar, seems similar. Okay, two times in 1 week, getting the same advice. TIme I did something about it!