Our next happy hour event is Thursday Feb 18 at The Boardroom (1609 Powell St) starting at 6 pm. Come and support our guest-bartenders, Gabby, Rachel, and Meredith, making delicious drinks for you while raising money for a great cause. Remember, all tips earned by them from 6 to 9 pm will be donated to our non-profit. See you then....
Our next happy hour event is this Thursday at Tonic Bar (on Polk at Union) starting at 6 pm on January 21st. Come and support our guest-bartenders, Julie, Juliet, Matt, and Preston, making delicious drinks for you while raising money for a great cause. Remember, all tips earned by them from 6 to 9 pm will be donated to our non-profit. See you then....
2009 was a gratifying and successful year for the Foundation for Freedom in the various aspects of projects, finance, communication and team building. With fund raising through the tireless efforts of Inna Goffman and her team, we were able to maintain ongoing funding commitments to our existing schools. We have also been able to sponsor 5 new schools bringing the total number of schools under the foundation’s wings to 15 including 2 schools that were sponsored in 2007 before we received our tax-exempt status. Our board and committees have functioned harmoniously with the inclusion of several new active volunteers recruited through the efforts of Eva Wong. Thank you Eva.
This year after the completion of our 2 year terms, the new board of directors and committee chairs have been elected. We have also established a new strategic committee that will be headed by Niall Batson. With the help of our new member Jeff Scanlan, the strategic committee will set our short and long term strategic plans. Welcome aboard Jeff.
I would also like to welcome Jennifer Cates, Kristie Manning and Chris Murray as valuable new members in our fund raising committee.
I traveled to Bangladesh and India to make onsite visits to our schools and was immensely pleased to see the stability of the infrastructure developments and academic progress in our schools. The problem of drop outs continue to be one of our challenges and we are planning to implement specific action plans that our project committee chair Shalin Sheth will discuss.
Our website has continued to evolve and going forward this year Rajiv Pramanik is the chair person for PR committee with critical focus on website and content development.
We had our first Chicago happy hour at the Drum and Monkey last Wednesday. it was extremely successful raising over $400 and connecting with many people interested in joining our cause and participating in the Chicago chapter.
I personally want to thank Guddi and Priti for organizing the event. They are already planning a host of future events in the Chicago area so stay tuned as they had a number of fun ideas that include kids events and creative happy hours.
Pictures to come...
On October 21 we will hold our first Chicago event at the Drum and Monkey. Check out our events page for more details.
I am very excited to share that we had our first New York City happy hour. Yes, that's right we are expanding to the Big Apple. I want to thank N**lan for organizing an excellent event at Havana Central - The West End on Sept 25th, 2009.
We had a small crowd come out for our event but we made many great connections with people that were interested in visiting the schools and others that wanted to connect some of the Columbia Faculty with the work we are doing on the ground. Thanks to all those that came out and we hope to see you again at our next NYC event.
Check out the picts from the event.
Where's FFF going next? Stay tuned.
I often get questions from Foundation for Freedom donors on where we have looked at expanding our supported schools and where we see growth next. We are actively working on expanding our presence in the currently represented countries, Niger, India, Bangladesh and Peru.
I particularily see Niger as a growth area for the Foundation for Freedom as we are one of very few US based non-profits working in Niger and there is a strong need for additional aid. FFF has a strong partnership with the Peacecorp in Niger where we are able to partner with local Peacecorp volunteers to build schools and do annual follow-ups at the schools. For our long term plans in Niger we are led by Michelle Stoner a former Peacecorp worker in Niger who has extensive experience working with non-profits, has developed contacts on the ground in Niger as well as the ability to speak Zarma, the local language from the west side of Niger.
Additionally, we are currently evaluating expansion into Ethopia and have some project proposals in the pipeline in Kenya. Stay tuned.
In the past we have looked at working in Burma but chose not to as we were uncomfortable with overcoming the legal aspects of transfering money into the country. We may re-evaluate this decision in the future.
I'm happy to start my FFF blog. I hope to share updates from our projects, my future ideas for the projects teams and literacy related links for videos and interesting data.
Here is a interesting PBS video on going back to school that Dr. Das sent me: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/episodes/time-for-school-series/full-episode-time-for-school-3-part-1/5532/
Foundation for Freedom helps twelve schools in four countries. The current schools enable successful primary education in areas where opportunities for education are otherwise limited. We use a variety of support mechanisms to support schools in order to help them improve the literacy of their students, lower drop out rates and raise attendance. The Foundation for Freedom wants to help create a world in which each and every child is literate regardless of geographic location or socioeconomic status.
We believe that education is the foundation from which the destitute are empowered to achieve the self-determination needed to improve their lives and the lives of those in their community.
Our Goal: Educate. Empower. Emancipate
Niger (Africa)
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Construction of the new school in Dan Amaria, Niger is progressing wonderfully.
There are over 30 pictures of the entire construction process thus far.
Here is a report from our local co-ordinator Cory Enger:
