Over this past year, we have crowd-sourced over $27500 for rural schools in Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia through social media - now we want to do even more in 2018!
This whole project began with a simple idea - to use our online influence to do some real tangible good in the world. With that idea in mind I came across the Giveback Giveaway, a project set up by Johnny Ward & Josh Henry.
After speaking to them about the ideas they had, it was clear that our goals were aligned and we started to figure out how we could work together.
The first project was to build a playground in rural Cambodia. We opened up the idea to our social media following and were blown away by the support - we raised $10000 in just a few weeks and flew out to Bangkok to begin the trip (with the travel costs covered by ourselves of course).
You can see the videos from that trip here:
Next, we decided to push it even further by crowd-sourcing funding to renovate a local school in rural Thailand on the border of Myanmar; home to Burmese migrate children who were displaced after the civil war.
We raised another $10000 in funding and flew to Thailand to put the project into action (again covering our own travel costs). We also opened both trips up to volunteers who could join us for a cost, which added to the overall pool we could give to the schools.
In just 3 days at the school we managed to:
-Build boys & girls dormitories
-Build 2 playgrounds
-Paint the classrooms
-Buy and install a fridge & freezer (which may not be a big deal to some of us, but it left the headmistress in tears)
-Throw a big party for the kids!
*Please note, the building of dormitories and playgrounds was done using local skilled labour which we paid for. We were just there to help where we could.
This was all thanks to donations from 266 people from all over the world and a simple idea from a few travel bloggers.
You can see the full video here:
In the last couple of weeks, Johnny and Josh have just run another trip to Myanmar after raising $7500 for the school there. Unfortunately I couldn't be involved in this one due to other conflicting projects, but you can see more details here.
The main thing for us was to leave a tangible difference in the communities we visited and make sure the money donated went to the right cause.
One of the problems with traditional charities is that a lot of the money people donate gets lost in admin costs and paying people wages - we just removed the middle man. We also offered an incentive for people to donate via a raffle system, meaning that one person that donated would get the chance to come on the trip with us for free. This meant that 90% of all donations would go to the school and 10% would go to the person who won, with 0% going towards admin costs, marketing or wages.
For me, this shows the good that the internet and social media can do, in a world where it is so often criticised. I would love for us to push on even further next year and take this to more communities with even more support. So now I'll put the question to you Steemit, how can we better this next year?
I would love to begin working on a project that also uses Steem to positively impact a community. Do you think this is possible?
Let me know your ideas in the comments below and if you'd like to be involved!
Thanks for reading!
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