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Borrowing a phrase from an email subject line, I'm glad to say that the Ghana Project is Powering Ahead! Since the last update, we've got SGD$288 for the Adopt-A-Child project! I figure that's enough to keep them up for like a third of the year. The Go-To-Ghana project, however, has been a bit more sluggish because of all details that are not confirmed. In any case, I've been receiving questions about the donations and perhaps it would be good for me to address some of those questions here... 1. How are the donations going to be transferred to Light For Children? We'll be transferring it to their Standard Chartered account. 2. What happens after that? From there, we'll start to receive updates regarding the progress of the child and also monthly reports on of the expenditure. We're aiming to keep everything transparent. On XSMatter's end, we'll ensure that when Light For Children sends us the report, we'll provide all donors with a copy of that report. This report details the how much was spent on food, education, medication and any other forms of expenditure. It will also have the child's physical condition like height, weight, and any other comments that are important to his development. In the meantime, we're actually working on creating an XSMatter-LightForChildren Donor's Platform where our donors can log-in and interact with each the child(Right now it's basically going to be a form to send out an email or something). Plans to develop this platform into something more broad-based which can allow donor-donor interaction are also in the plans, but not yet in the pipeline. 3. How much are you intending to raise? We're going to keep the fund raising going all the way until we reach $1000. Once we hit that amount, we'll stop the fundraising. The reason we don't want to raise too much at once is because this is a first time project and we want to get the work protocols between xsmatter and light for children right before moving ahead with conducting another round of fundraising next year. We hope to do more than fundraising though...simply because money alone will not be enough to solve the problem over there. 4. When is the Ghana trip going to be confirmed? Ok, here's the thing, the Ghana trip can be confirmed so long as there are people who are going and willing to pay the cost of the trip. Estimates right now show that the flight and transport costs will amount to around $2200. Inclusive of around 2 months worth of living expenses, it's probably going to amount to somewhere just under $3000. What XSMatter hopes to do is to form a team and then source for some form of sponsorship to either cover the costs or to lessen the cost per person because we understand that $3k isn't a small sum for many people. Despite that, the value of getting involved outweighs the cost which thus justifies the effort that we're all going to put in to try to make this happen. Of course, if you don't care about cost and you want to go to Ghana right this minute, you can either contact Light For Children directly or you can let me us know and we'll link you up with the Light For Children chairman who happens to be in Singapore until August. 4. How else can I get involved? People have asked if they can donate items and such. Well, right now, it's really expensive to bring or ship things over to Ghana and many non-cash donations are actually brought over by asking the volunteers to lug it when they go over there. That said, there are many ways to get involved. You could - blog about this project and show people the wiki over at www.xsmatter.com/LightForChildren .
- of course, donate
- help us find donors / sponsors
- suggest more ways of making this project successful
- go for the Idealist.org meeting on the 17th March to bounce off ideas with us
I'm thinking of creating a ribbon for people to put in the corner of their sites or something...Do you want to beat me to it? | 
