Lets Talk Poverty

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Lets Talk Poverty

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CF Blog moved to www.christmasfuture.org

Greeting everyone!
We are 33 days until our launch! Please be sure to keep updated about our activities and successes on our new blog: www.christmasfuture.org
Thanks for all you support.
Leif

93 Days to Launch

Unbelievable! This past year has been flying by as we are preparing for the launch of ChristmasFuture to the world. And as the pace continues to increase so does the level of reality in the decision making. The organization itself is becoming more of a real entity right before our eyes. All of the effort of groundwork and attempting to do things 'the right way' are now bearing some good fruit. Of course, we're not perfect, and we never will be - we just strive to be authentic about what we experience and where we're at. A little glimpse into the kinds of things we've been up to in the past few weeks:

- We've been making huge strides towards the completion of the DonorTrust software - which is an open-source project meaning we will open it up to the world of software developers to enhance / improve as well as give it away to other NGO's that want to use it to improve their business models.
- We'll be able to show you some screen-shots very soon

- We've brought on a full-time Project Manager to keep all of our work in order - and coming from corporate North America, managing volunteers is COMPLETELY different than managing staff.

- After some significant effort we've been able to raise another $30,000, enabling us to hire more people to help get C-Foo launched this year

- We've decided to hire a professional fund development agency to define what our NGO 2.0 Fund Development Organization should look like, as we are directing 100% of the Christmas season investors towards the projects they choose and covering our own organization's overhead costs separately.

- We've been meeting with potential implementing partners to get their projects in the database for you folks to donate to. This is a thorough process that is being managed by a team of 7 people with over 100 years of International Development expertise combined! What a team we have.

- In line with our 'new way of doing NGO work' we continue to try to keep our overheads low by not having an office space and working out of coffee shops. It's fantastic! I've met and continue to meet the most amazing people at 'the office'

- We had a meeting with the Ideaca team last week to determine the service levels they will be providing to us. They will be giving us top of the line support at no charge - incredible!
-For those of you who don't know, Ideaca is a world-class technology developer and provider with offices across Canada. They are providing us with servers and supporting those servers to host the website and software at no cost, they have given us the equivalent of 2 Full-Time software developers on their own tab, and made their office space available to us for meetings. They have been absolutely amazing to us!

- We're arranging to have our quarterly get-together at Ironwood in Inglewood (yes - in Calgary)...it's always a great time to get together with the other folks that are giving their time and their lives to help end extreme poverty in our world...it's a great community of friends...come on out at 6pm if you're interested.

So the pace has been rapid but it is exhilarating! This truly has been the best 4 years of my life...I wouldn't change a thing if it meant I wouldn't be right here right now.

Hope to talk to you all again soon....yikes...93 days! Gotta go!


....jay

Jay Baydala

Roll On!

Things continue to move forward for our little organization. Right now it seems like there are some very significant events that are about to tip forward into reality.
- Working with a local Marketing / Communications firm on our Strategic Mktg plan and implementing it (to be named soon)
- More meetings with an international organization that will help with finances and spreading the word to over 900 Canadian employees
- Building of the first iteration of our open-source software DonorTrust (http://donortrust.rubyforge.org/)
- Further discussions with Millennium Promise regarding future project work and the pilot project in Sauri, Kenya
- Getting closer to getting the word out on YouTube about our organization and inviting YOU to come help us change the world!
- Key team roles being filled just when they are needed! We've added 7 people in the past 4 weeks!
- Applying to be featured at the NetSqared Conference in May (http://www.netsquared.org/)
- Further discussions with other organizations (non-profit and for profit) to see how we could work together to maximize the good in the world! More details will follow as relationships become clearer.

Needless to say, we have been VERY busy...but we keep rollin on! The revolution has begun.....get ready!

...jay

Sharing the Story

Christmas 2006, like most Christmases, brought opportunity for me to reconnect with family and friends. But this Christmas was different for me; I now had the ChristmasFuture story to share.

As I would begin to explain about the fact that North American’s spend $1 Trillion every Christmas season, the response was always the same. Disgust. Shock. Followed by a slightly embarrassed acknowledgement that they knew it to be true and that there is something inherently wrong with some of the choices our society has been making.

Then I would explain about ChristmasFuture’s mission and our strategies to help change the world for good. Some were really excited; about the development work, having a meaningful way of giving to their loved ones next Christmas, or the idea of the school program finding it’s way into their children’s school. Others were more skeptical and spoke of the distrust they have for NGOs and their reluctance to give any more of their hard earned money. Whatever their original position, conversations were had, questions were asked, ideas were challenged and we all learned from one another, about one another, and began a dialogue the world needs us all to have.

I know it shouldn’t surprise me, but I was amazed – I am amazed, at how the ChristmasFuture story invites critical dialogue, ignites passion within and provides a home for others to place their hope. I still have one uncle to work on, but almost everyone I have shared the story with (and I like to talk!) has been willing to allow themselves to hope - for something different, something more – to envision a world that can change…for good.

As I move forward in my daily tasks and managing some of the details of making the ChristmasFuture opportunity available to North Americans this upcoming Christmas, I hold this hope in my heart. It drives me, inspires me, fuels my passion and propels me forward.

So thank you! Thank you to everyone who has allowed me to share this story and allowed hope to grow in your heart, and as a result…in mine.

...Kim

New Year Starts with a Bang!

I’m happy I took a few days to catch my breath over the holidays. I’ve been anticipating that this is going to be a great year for me personally and for ChristmasFuture – and i've been more than correct so far! Things have continued along a ‘destined’ path as reality continues to conspire to bring ChristmasFuture to the world. We have a pretty straight line towards our launch this Christmas!

• We started fairly early by getting our core team together with a few experts to hold our inaugural annual strategic planning session. We spent the entire day talking about priorities and goals of the organization, working towards formalizing the next revision of our strategic plan.

• We’ve had some fantastic success with our pilot project. Over 600 students learned about global citizenship, extreme poverty, and NGO’s…and many of them went through an ‘awakening’…saying things like ‘nobody ever told me that the rest of the world doesn’t live like us’ or ‘we’ve gotta do something…now!”. Through that program they donated over $10,000 CDN towards the building of a school library in Sauri, Kenya – as part of a holistic plan for that village.

• We’ve begun our operational fundraising campaign for the last 2 weeks of 2006 and were able to raise over $70,000 towards our 2007 operational budget of $450,000. There’s been an amazing response.

• We initiated something called ‘The Founders’ – anyone that has given time or money towards our 2007 budget will always be known as one of The Founders…the first people that were willing to say there was something wrong in the world and they are going to do something about it!

• There have been several talks initiated at a partnership level with various other organizations that want to change the world…for good! We are truly defining and participating in what it means to be the next generation of NGO’s…and similar people and organizations are gravitating towards each other. It’s truly and exciting time!

• As we continue to be available and prepared all of the right things just keep happening! When we think we’ve got it all figured out it falls apart. When we ‘let go’ the magic just keeps happening!

• We’re fully in the transitional stage of an organization between ‘startup’ and ‘systems’ stages – we are formalizing process, policies, and tools as we grow and reach the necessary organizational capability to achieve our goal of launching in 2007 and moving towards eradicating extreme poverty!

• We are all very conscious of the fact that the choices we make now shape the culture of the organization and each step determines who we collectively are. I’ve heard it said that as you do one thing you do all things…so we are striving to uphold our core values ion every interaction and choice we make.

That’s about it for now. I’ll keep you posted as we move forward…so many amazing things happening! Thank you for staying with us for the ride so far.

…jay

Change the World? We Are!

~ from Lana Friesen, Grade 5 Humanities Teacher at Calgary Science School

Wow - for the past week and a half there has been so much energy and passion bubbling to the surface in class from my grade 5's. The lessons about extreme poverty have sparked an interest in how other people live, where there is hope and how we, who have so much, can help. It has been a wake up call about why we should know about poverty and why we should care.

Erin Wilkins from CAUSE Canada launched the week with an excellent introduction to the 8 Millennium Development Goals and helped to bring the significance of building a school in an Kenyan village to life with posters of the goals on the board which she connected with arrows as she got the kids talking about how lives would be changed because of this school.

We are becoming Global Citizens. Students who didn't know what poverty was or where it existed have watched documentaries about real people in Cambodia, India, and several African countries. After watching the first doc from Poipet, Cambodia, one of the girls in my class shared that she'd traveled there last year with her family and offered to bring in her own photos and stories from her experiences there. This very far away place became very real. Her dad is coming in this week to share more of their around the world trip that opened their eyes to the differences in how people live.

We were fortunate to meet and question the documentary filmmaker, Rick Castiligone, who taught us the word SUUBI (the word for "hope" that he learned in an African village). His films showed some of the desperate situations that poverty creates and introduced us to people who are working to change that and bring hope. This is what we all need to know - that so many people live this way and that we can do something to improve their lives. The students had so many questions, powerful questions. He commented that the 10 year olds in the class asked questions that he was used to hearing in the college classes he teaches.

We had Deng, a Lost Boy of Sudan, in to tell us part of his incredible story of survival and the hope that he lives by. For many of the boys in the class, the idea of having an AK47 might have sounded kind of cool a week ago, but that changed rapidly when Deng shared the reality of why he had to carry a weapon for 2 years as a child soldier. Survival was not just some video game. His biggest message to the kids revolved around thanking their parents for everything in their lives, being grateful to live in Canada, to learn as much as they can in school, and to realize just how much we all have here.

Today, during 'If the World Were a Village Day', students got a first hand experience about life in the Global Village when they randomly picked slips of coloured paper that would determine if they were in the top 20% (green), the middle 60% (blue) or the bottom 20% (red) of the world’s population related to income. It was fascinating to watch the morning unfold as they were told that there groups were to create a poster about the theme "Life's Not Fair" after the conditions were attached.
The green group got 86 of the poster making supplies and could work anywhere in the room, blue had 13 supplies and were restricted to 3 tables (no chairs) and the red group had 1 old pencil and had to stay on the bamboo mat on the floor. The way the world typically reacts played out in class as if it had been scripted -– the red group huddled in the corner and struggled, frustrated that they wanted to do more "but didn'’t have the means to do it"– they also got really creative. One boy in the group said “Our poster is invisible.” How fitting. They surmised that the people in poor countries must feel invisible as well. The biggest word on their poster was "HELP"

The blue group had a lot of resourceful people who took charge and put in an impressive effort. However, quite a few people didn’t contribute and just hung out on the sidelines. There were 2 messages on their poster that stood out -– one complaining that they didn't have as much as the “other group" (ie green) and one being thankful for what they did have.

The first thing the green group did was cheer, gloat about what they had, and then run around to the other groups flaunting their materials. They made the biggest mess in the room with garbage and materials strewn about. Their poster was filled with glossy magazine pictures depicting luxury and excess in the "rich” column, with a few token photos of impoverished people in the "poor” column.

In the end, they claimed they weren’t allowed to share materials, despite the fact that that was not the case. They used only 51% of their materials, while the other 2 groups had used 100%.

Part way through the activity, one blue boy came up to me and exclaimed, "The red group are the extreme poverty group, I'’m in the average group and the green group is the really rich group. I get it!” He came up to me two more times throughout the day saying "I get it!".

When we debriefed they figured out why those numbers were chosen - this is how the real world works, they weren'’t randomly chosen. We all fit into the green group. What are we going to do about our actions?

They suggested that we do this again, when the groups could share and have the new poster theme be "Life Could be More Fair if We..."

Interesting results!

Throughout all of this, students are asking to learn more about child labour & smuggling, sweatshops, HIV/AIDS, debt cancellation, why kids don’t go to school, and what WE can do to make a difference.

This feels like an incredibly important and powerful issue to be learning about together. We can make a difference.
We are making a difference, as evidenced by this comment yesterday when a student explained why she had just made a donation to ChristmasFuture: “Before last week, I didn't even know what poverty was and just thought that everyone lived like I did.” - Sarah. 10 years old.