update about our initiative and some reflections on NGO's foundation

Hii friends in World Pulse

I wrote an initiative a couple of weeks ago and now the content has been finished. Right now I am doing some fundraising work for the implementation. My main focus is to do email outreach to potential sponsor orgs. I targeted some orgs ,big orgs like UNwomen, FAO,World Bank, Alibaba foundation (China)and some local ogs like KOAN, IFAD, Small Farm cities, African Women's Development Fund and a lot of orgs with a mission in eliminating poverty and agriculture. But for now, I only received reply from KOAN. We had a online meeting and discussed some opportuniteis in collaboration. It was the program manager Mr.Samuel Ndungu who replied to me and denoted that we could have a talk. The meeting went very well even though there were some interludes due to network connections. Notably, I was extremely nervous and worried that the gentlemen wouldn't show up because of my absent credibility. After all, this initiative has just been on the paper and I didn't have tight financial foundation and team resource to implement it yet. And my student identity also intensified my self-doubt. But fortunately he showed up and I prepared a powerpoint and a presentation. I listed a couple of points that we may collaborate in and he acknowledged most of them and commented that we could have a long term partnership. This meeting is a pretty good start for me and get me more motivation to head forward.

But it is still a long journey. For now I only received feedback and reply from one orgnization which is also a NGO. They have been pretty professional in some fields like agriculture but they also face some issues for example fundraising,same as us. I used to think fundraising is a pretty easy or at least not hard . You just need to have a clear mission and deomnstrate clearlly who you want to help and how you are gonna make it happen. Then purposefully, people will be willing to help it becuase it is non-profit and the money is not going to flow into my pocket. But when I started to do some fundraising, I felt that I was wrong.

First came the question, why people should give money to you even if you are just trying to do something good for the underpreviliged? It is not their obligation to hand their earned money to a charity. And how do you make sure that the money will be leveraged totally to the underpreviliged after I hand it to you if you can't prove your 100% transparent use of funds?

These questions are difficult because the system of non-profit relies on mutal trust while it's easy to be distorted and hard to be validated. The first stage of fundraising seems to hit a bottleneck period.

However, There are also some internal questions. For example, emails sometimes may not leave a important or good impression to others or may not interest some orgs. Other senarios, the meail will just be spammed and didn't successfully return to their email inbox. I tried to call but most of the time the call couldn't make through and was hung up a couple of times when I was just about to share my proposal to them.

I contemplated whether I should find a job first or start a business to generate some income before establishing a solid financial foundation for my initiative.

But rejection is redirection. I will go on doing outreach and doing reflections and I believe passion and perseverance will take me into the right direction