Creating significant impact for a few is sometimes more effective than trying to change an entire community. By providing support for twenty families in Nicaragua, Friends of Families United understands this concept well. Their numbers clearly indicate that full dedication to a small group can create large-scale impact.
The basic mission at Friends of Families United is to help twenty extremely poor families in Esteli, Nicaragua that are struggling to educate their kids and keep them healthy. Mothers in these families are mostly single moms with very limited skills who earn as little as $2 a day (just $320 per year) working as domestics, or doing washing and ironing. Families like these form a quarter of the populace in Nicaragua, which is second only to Haiti in terms of poverty.
These families—-20 mothers, several fathers, 50 school-aged kids and 30 older teens and grandparents—-are organized into a support group called the Families United Association, with their own Coordinating Committee to manage activities within the group. An Executive Board in the U.S. interacts with a Committee of Care in Nicaragua to carry out the actual work of the organization by using funds provided by our member donors to create programs and monitor them.
The Friends here in the U.S. sponsor individual kids by providing them with targeted funding in areas of education, health and nutrition. For a $120 annual child sponsorship we are able to:
- send these 50 kids to school (with uniforms, shoes, and school supplies).
- give them two medical exams a year, plus daily vitamins and calcium
- provide them with fresh veggies year-round (from the Garden of Hope).
Beyond this basic safety net of programs-—which actually benefit the entire family—-we also help the families improve their housing (for example, by replacing leaky metal roofs) and financial security (with a savings and loan fund to which we give matching dollars). These programs spell H-O-P-E for these families living in extreme poverty.
Our Executive Board has used the Grassroots.org Toolbox primarily to establish a website. The self-editing tools that Grassroots.org provides nonprofits free of charge allow us to tell our story more effectively through words and photos. We are using our new website to keep our current members informed of our activities and also to encourage them to use our online donation service. To further raise our profile, we use a newsletter to activate our members and reach out to prospective donors. Anyone can obtain a free subscription to our monthly newsletter, the UPDATE, by going to our website and clicking on “Contact Us".
We now have an attractive online presence! Thank you, Grassroots.org!
-John De Jong
[email protected]
Friends of Families United
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