Some days it seems harder than ever to face the troubles of this world.  And harder still to know how to have an effect on those troubles. 

Some problems are so great that they can only be addressed by governments or larger organizations, and to be sure those are crucial to address.

Others can be resolved at a personal level, and millions of acts of kindness are done every day in every community in the world, out of view, and definitely off the radar of heat-seeking news organizations.

I can't imagine what it must be like to be a good-hearted Gambian working in a village school or a coastal community and knowing that many of the children in your community are not in school simply for lack of uniforms, shoes, and a few books, but also to know that you don't have the resources to help them.  I do know that when offered the opportunity to be part of GambiaRising's program to offer support to these children, our Community Coordinators are elated to help, with no thought of being paid to do so.  

Our ability to offer this opportunity to them, and to the children in their communities, depends on just two things: last year's supporters renewing their support, and new supporters joining us.  Half our donors are now donating monthly, which gives us comfort year-round, and many of our annual donors donated in August and September this year, so  by the beginning of this school year, we felt that we would have enough support to take care of our current students.  So we told our Coordinators that their budgets would be the same as last year.  How they spent the money was up to them.  To our surprise, they came back with student rosters with several hundred more students than last year.  How did they do this?  Their budgets told the tale: they squeezed the amount of support they gave to continuing students so they could help others go back to school.  They were uncomfortable doing this (and so were we), but they made the right choice: a student who had only one new uniform was suffering less than one who was not in school for lack of any.  The Coordinators also showed great ingenuity: negotiating deals with tailors, buying school supplies in bulk; one school even had its older sewing students make uniforms (using sewing machines funded by a GambiaRising donor).  For students at Gambia College they paid only the  first term's tuition, and asked families who could not possibly pay for all the tuition, to contribute just 10-20% of it if they possibly could.  

We measure our "campaigns" in terms of school years:  summer to summer.  So it is too soon to tell the tale of the full school year.  But we know this already: by year's end more than 80% of those who donated last school year have done so again this year.  At first, the three dozen donors who donated last year and did not again was disappointing, but I now realize that many of them only intended to make a one-time donation and we are definitely grateful they did.  And those who know about the non-profit world, tell us that an 80+% renewal rate is unheard of outside of religious institutions.  So that's great news.  The other good news is that some of those renewing donors increased their giving.  And more than 30 new donors have also now joined us.

The combination of these two meant that several weeks ago, we told our Coordinators we could increase their budgets.  They could get those students that extra uniform they needed, but  more importantly, they could begin accepting new students.  

And so it has been a busy time.  Schools were closed for the Christmas holidays, so the Coordinators who are teachers had the time to make home visits and qualify applicants, then to meet with tailors and secure other supplies.  I am going to include some photos of the families and young Gambians who have come to our Coordinators in the last several months, all of whom we added to our waiting list and told them we didn't have funds to help them.  But we have now been able to fund scholarships for every one of them (and more).  So I'll include some photos of those as well.  All these will be in school when schools open on Monday. 

Some times an older student brings her siblings, but more often the person who brings them is either the mother or (if both parents are dead) the grandmother.  These women, usually widows but increasingly also including divorcees, did not have the chance to get an education and now they are fiercely determined to find a way for their children to have that chance. 

If you are donating to GambiaRising, this is what you are causing to happen.  If you are not (yet), then please join us. 

In communities across The Gambia, lives have been changed because of you.  Thank you for being part of GambiaRising.

Mike McConnell
Managing Trustee
GambiaRising
www.gambiarising.org
www.facebook.com/gambiarising

1500 Park Avenue #PH 503
Emeryville, CA  95608