Dorje Gurung and GalliGalli know education is freedom for the children living in rural Nepal
GalliGalli exists to assist the citizens and visitors of Nepal navigate the city and government services in an effort to literally get most of Nepal on the map. In their second campaign with StartSomeGood, they are raising funds to help provide high quality education to children in rural Nepal.
Dorje Gurung was born into a family of low socio-economic status in a small town in Nepal, which meant he had to attend a local government school. These local government schools suffer from poor infrastructure, a lack of resources, poorly trained teachers, high dropout rates, and very low exam pass rates. A teacher recognized Dorje’s potential and helped get him into a high quality school in Kathmandu where his education was subsidized by the owners. This simple step was a real life-changing moment for Dorje. He was able to attend college on scholarship and become a teacher. He realizes how much education has contributed to his success and his freedom and now wants to give back to his community by helping one of the government schools he visited last summer.
(a typical government school classroom in rural Nepal)
The government school in Sindhupalchowk needs an overhaul, and Dorje is ready to help its students succeed. His $28,135 tipping point goal will help him and GalliGalli begin a holistic intervention at this school and find a sustainable source of income to keep it growing. Projects include building a playground, updating the teaching methods for Science and English, building a community-based fishery as a sustainable source of income for the school, and building the first floor of a new school that will include two classrooms. Funds beyond the tipping point will help the team build a library and a second floor to expand the school from 8th grade to 12th grade. If you believe education can change the lives of the children of Sindupalchowk for the better, please help Dorje and GalliGalli reach their fundraising goals!
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What good do you want to create? Visit StartSomeGood today to learn about how to start your own campaign.
“Do or die” for migrant health
There’s a prominent and growing gap in access to affordable, quality, and culturally relevant healthcare for migrants and refugees in Australia. Because of this, they hold off on seeking help until it’s too late, resulting in higher costs for everyone involved. This quickly escalates into a lose-lose situation; the migrants are extremely sick and are therefore an even larger burden on the public healthcare system.
World Wellness Group is a not for profit started by a group of professional healthcare practitioners striving to address health inequality in Brisbane. Last year, they launched the World Wellness Clinic, a makeshift operation that they set up with no financial support at the Brisbane Multicultural Centre. They have been operating there in two rooms rent free for the past year, but they have quickly outgrown their capacity and need to set up something larger and more permanent.
World Wellness Group has tapped into an unmet need, but this means the demand is now exceeding their available resources. Just $60,000 will secure them rent for an entire year, in addition to allowing them to set up the administrative services necessary to support a much larger clinic. This will help accommodate the growing list of healthcare practitioners who want to join the center in providing services to migrant patients in need of support. It’s “do or die time” for the clinic and your help will mean contributing to the health of countless migrants in need.
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What good do you want to create? Visit StartSomeGood today to learn about how to start your own campaign.
High-tech, low cost mini-clinics revolutionizing healthcare in Kenya
Access to basic healthcare is fundamental to our quality of life. Unfortunately, in Kenya, access to medical care is primarily determined by wealth. This leads to the startling fact that almost a tenth of children die before their fifth birthday. Access Afya is tackling this problem by creating ultra-mini clinics that will provide health services to the neediest families in Nairobi.
Access Afya’s approach to providing medical care is distinct; designed to assist the extreme poor who are less likely to access preventative and life-saving treatments, use family planning, and seek out their HIV status. They will provide a clean and private health experience for patients who live in Nairobi’s slums, where conditions tend to exacerbate disease. This will regulate medical processes that are typically unregulated and help reduce preventable deaths. Their model is based on a strong foundation of technology, using computers to keep records, store medical histories, communicate with patients, and manage medical resources.
Currently, Access Afya has assisted 400 patients for various conditions ranging from asthma treatment to HIV counseling. Now, they intend to further their impact by creating a second clinic. Reaching their $10,000 tipping point goal will allow them to begin building this clinic and $26,000 will help them provide salaries, buy various supplies, and, most importantly, begin to make the clinic self-sustaining. With 24 days left in the campaign, they are so close to reaching their goal—let’s help get them there and contribute to a better future for the 20 million Kenyans living in poverty that Access Afya will empower to take charge of their own health and well-being.
Learn more about Access Afya’s campaign on StartSomeGood
Asibi Danjuma
I am a 23-year-old Londoner currently in law school. I have a BA in Politics and International Relations and an LLB in law. I have worked as a Student Facilitator for the British Red Cross, taught at local schools in Berkshire and have done a lot of pro bono legal research for Amnesty International and the Arizona Capital Trials Project. When I finish law school, I hope to start saving the world by working in developmental research and perhaps move to Paris to eat macaroons, dabble in photography and write stories. I’m also an avid reader, white wine drinker and world traveler.
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What good do you want to create? Visit StartSomeGood today to learn about how to start your own campaign.
Boost farm-to-table food culture and get a fresh produce “thank you”
Local seasonal produce is fresher and more sustainable than produce sold at large supermarkets and it promotes relationships between consumers and local farmers. Cutting down on miles traveled means less food waste, less fuel used, and, of course, tastier fruits and veggies!
Food Connect Sydney highlights these many advantages of sourcing produce locally. Their mission is to grow healthy food communities by delivering boxes of fresh and seasonal produce direct from local farmers around Sydney. They stress the importance of knowing the farmers who grow our food and how it is grown and believe large supermarkets have created a disconnect between us as consumers and these local farmers.
Now Food Connect Sydney wants to take the farmer-consumer relationship one step further and bring YOU to meet local farmers. They are running a series of sustainable farm tours where you will be guided through local sustainable farms that supply Food Connect Sydney, connect with farmers, participate in a Q&A session, learn how to cook with the farm’s produce, and have to opportunity to purchase delicious in-season fruits and veggies. What’s really great about this campaign is your money goes directly to paying the farmers for their time. Just $35 buys you a farm tour ticket and a little extra will get you the ticket plus a harvest pack from the farm.
Join Food Connect Sydney in getting to know your local farmer!
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What good do you want to create? Visit our site to learn about how to start your own campaign.
Women Cycling Their Way to Recovery
The benefits of cycling are innumerable—both physically and mentally. Cycling not only burns calories like crazy but it also helps to make people happier. Exercise helps produce those lovely little chemicals called endorphins that boost people’s moods and trigger happy feelings. Studies show that regular exercise can reduce stress and anxiety, tackle depression, and improve self-esteem. In addition, group exercise can give individuals suffering from feelings of isolation the chance to feel supported.
Gearing Up provides marginalized women—those recovering from abuse, addiction, or incarceration—the chance to ride bikes to improve their physical, mental, and social well-being. This gives them a chance to identify with a community and feel like they are supported by creating their own social ties with a group of women going through the same process. Gearing Up not only uses the bicycle as a tool for recovery, but also as a way to create lifelong connections and support for these women. Braking Cycles, a short documentary about Gearing Up, profiles this recovery process by telling the story of three women who used Gearing Up to break free from seemingly hopeless situations.
Each woman in the program can earn her very own bike by pedaling her first 100 miles. It costs Gearing Up about $380 to provide incentives for each woman during this process. In 2013, Gearing Up has a goal to graduate 36 women as bicycle owners. To get 36 women to 100 miles pedaled on their way to a brand new bike, it will cost $13,680. Gearing Up aspires to raise half of this via StartSomeGood and support 18 women with $6,840. Every little bit counts on the way to changing a life—the $4,560 campaign tipping point goal will support 12 women through their first 100 miles.
So, let’s Gear Up and Change a Life today through cycling!
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What good do you want to create? Visit our site to learn about how to start your own campaign.
Inspiring Connections through Creativity
Sometimes I sit back and think about my childhood. The creativity I possessed at that age is almost unfathomable. As children, we’re constantly asking “Why?” and “How?” and we never feel stifled because of how we think people will judge us. Yet, as we grow, our creativity takes a back seat to logic and reason and insecurities about how others will perceive our outside-the-box thoughts. Think about the power we had, as children, to utilize our endless and unencumbered creativity to generate positive change in the world.
A Girl in the World is bottling this creativity to create and share stories that will strengthen the connections between children and adults. By encouraging and empowering children to share their own stories, A Girl in the World is creating a comfortable space for children and adults to have conversations that matter—conversations that lead to life and world-changing ideas. Giving children the opportunity to express their creativity in a safe environment contributes to their mental, emotional, and spiritual health and helps them grow into creative adults who don’t feel the need to stifle their ideas. It also builds confidence, allowing children to understand they have the power to affect change through their ideas and the choices they make.
To unleash this creativity onto the world, A Girl in the World is creating a series of books, digital apps, and workshops that inspire connection between children and adults. This series will encourage children and adults to share their thoughts and feelings in a safe environment to nourish communication and connection. A Girl in the World is already an eco-friendly children’s book produced in Australia. The next step is to create A Girl in the World App to launch this story into the digital world. With $2,383 already pledged and 18 days left, A Girl in the World is just within reach of the $3,000 tipping point goal that will cover the costs involved in creating the App and releasing the book into E-Pub format for e-readers. Funds raised beyond the tipping point goal will go toward the printing costs of the second book in their series, ‘A Girl in the World and Her Girl Adventure’.
Let’s help A Girl in the World realize their dream of creating a world that cares, shares, and creates change collaboratively.
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What good do you want to create? Visit our site to learn about how to start your own campaign.
Making Recycling Foxy With the Green Fox Project
Comprised of over 200 inhabited islands, Greece is a country where local sustainable efforts will have a huge impact on the big picture of the future for their nation. Skiathos, one of these many islands, is a rugged woodland with olive groves and pine woods scattered amongst more than 60 sandy beaches which attract a massive tourism influx during the summer months. With barely enough potable water for the islands permanent population, the tenfold population increase that begins in May easily equates to an increase in the consumption of bottled beverages. The small landfill on the island struggles to keep up with these consumption levels and such excess could spell disaster for this beautiful Greek treasure. Luckily, a chapter of the International Women’s Association on Skiathos has been actively pursuing methods to outweigh the countless tonnes of PET bottles and aluminium cans imported to the island.
For the past two years a group of women passionate about the preservation of their island, known as the Green Fox Project, has been introducing recycling methods, raising awareness about recycling, and involving the local community to adopt their methods. They knew if the landfill would not step up to the plate and gather these recyclables, they would have to create their own system that could. With custom made removable nets placed inside of receptacle bins located at bus stops and supermarkets, the Green Foxes have successfully handled over 80 tonnes of recycling in two years. The contents of these nets, often collected daily, are brought to the “Fox House” where bottles and cans are sorted, baled, and transported to recycling facilities on the Greek mainland.
You might be wondering where the flaw in this system is, but imagine transporting dozens of nets filled with hundreds of recyclables by foot and in cars? After their donated truck recently broke down, the Green Foxes have been walking and driving their own cars to continue collecting these nets, but this method simply will not work come May when the tourists begin arriving with their bottles and cans. Their StartSomeGood campaign has already reached its Tipping Point of $2,500, which will allow the group to rent a vehicle during the busy season and ensure continued recycling. With more than $6,500 already donated, less than $3,500 separates the Green Foxes from reaching their Total Funding Goal which will allow them to purchase a new (second hand) truck for collection and employ two paid workers to sort, bale, and prepare the recyclables for transportation. Help these women make a statement for recycling in Greece by supporting them in their initiative to keep Skiathos green.
Nick Kovaleski
conservative conservationist, environmental innovator, lost in translation, @babson educated, trying to @addmoregreen. a connecticut native who followed his intuition to his current home in australia. here to share my insight on sustainability and green living in an effort to re-educate mankind. avid runner, healthy vegetarian, green-thumbed gardener, meandering life’s path.
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What good do you want to create? Visit our site to learn about how to start your own campaign.
At FIGMENT DC, We Are All Artists
Many of us have a tendency, when we think about art, to see it as unattainable and not relatable. It can be intimidating and, in the eyes of many, is synonymous with pretention, status, and commercialism. To me, though, art isn’t about collecting as many famous artists’ expensive pieces as possible or walking around art galleries sipping champagne and barely paying attention to the exhibits. Art is about freedom of expression, creativity, and participation. Art should be attainable and fun and should foster your inner creativity to help it break through to the surface. Deep down inside, we are all artists.
FIGMENT is a free, interactive, non-commercial, volunteer-run, participatory arts festival for artists of all ages. It gives community members the chance to create, engage, and play in a safe and welcoming environment that encourages creativity. Most importantly, it makes art accessible to the community and provides an alternative to the commercialism that defines most of society today. Its goal is to demonstrate to people what art can be—participatory, creative, and free; a chance for artists to share their imagination with the public.
FIGMENT is a grassroots effort organized and run entirely by volunteers that started in 2007 on Governors Island in Manhattan. Since then, it has grown quickly to include more projects, participants, volunteers, and locations. Last September, a team of over 20 volunteers provided an opportunity to bring over 100 artists to share their exhibitions with each other and members of the Washington DC community for its inaugural FIGMENT event. They are back this year and looking to put on another event in September in Anacostia Park.
Since FIGMENT is non-commercial, the team relies solely on the generosity of others to make the event successful. Imagine a world of color, dancing, art, creativity, laughter, and fun. FIGMENT is what you make out of it and it can’t happen without you. The event in DC may be free to the public, but the volunteer team still needs to cover all of the infrastructure costs. Since FIGMENT DC does not accept corporate sponsorship, doesn’t sell tickets, and doesn’t charge artists to participate, it relies heavily on people like you to make the event a reality. The tipping point goal of $3,850 will cover the base costs associated with hosting the event at the park, including National Park Service staff and security and portajohn rentals. The full $12,000 will go a long way in helping cover all the costs associated with the event including, but not limited to, insurance, permits, volunteers shirts, and transportation for participants. Let’s help support free, participatory art in Washington DC by helping fully fund FIGMENT DC!
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What good do you want to create? Visit our site to learn about how to start your own campaign.
Earthworker: A Solar Co-operation
One of the best resources Australia has been blessed to receive from Mother Nature is the amount of sun we experience here Down Under. While it’s important to have sunsense and never forget your SPF, Australians have proven they also have sense of how beneficial the sun really is. Solar Water Heating (SWH), a system used to heat the water for your house naturally, first came to reality in the US before 1900; but Australia is one of few countries to really use the technology on a national scale. Not only do we value our largest star for relatively free hot water, soon a visionary group of Australians will translate the sun’s brilliance into a sustainable network of “green” jobs. The unionist environmental group Earthworker Co-operative is transitioning to a more sustainable economy by introducing worker-owned co-operatives.
What started as a vision in the 1990’s by Dave Kerrin and Bob Higginson is now evolving into the project they both dreamed of; providing workers with secure manufacturing jobs producing sustainable products. Earthworker is raising funds to aid in the process of launching a factory in Morwell, VIC where a green-workers co-operative will be manufacturing solar hot water units. By offering local communities the opportunity to buy into the concept of these worker-owned co-ops, Earthworker is shaping the future as “A vision of a better world and not merely a bigger share of this one at the expense of others”. The factory, Eureka’s Future, will begin to serve as an inspiring reminder that harvesting naturally renewable resources will pay off in the long-run.
Energy here in Australia has been cheaply fueled by locally-mined coal-fired electricity. Earthworker’s plan to combat this situation is to produce renewable technologies, which will not come without some financing of solar proportions. Overall the factory in Morwell will cost around $2 million (AUD) to establish a fully functioning operating system. The organization’s very productive campaign is funding their Licence to Co-operate to finance the first run of solar hot water units under licence from Australian manufacturer Douglas Solar. Now they have 25 days to raise additional funds for the cost of licences, equipment, and further establishment of the costly factory. This is Australia’s chance to demonstrate how to empower workers and produce meaningful technologies for a globally sustainable future.
Nick Kovaleski
conservative conservationist, environmental innovator, lost in translation, @babson educated, trying to @addmoregreen. a connecticut native who followed his intuition to his current home in australia. here to share my insight on sustainability and green living in an effort to re-educate mankind. avid runner, healthy vegetarian, green-thumbed gardener, meandering life’s path.
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What good do you want to create? Visit our site to learn about how to start your own campaign.
Innovative Ways to Prevent Social Exclusion
Social exclusion marginalizes people from meaningful participation in their societies. Children, the homeless, victims of gender violence, and those with little resources are among the most susceptible to exclusion. ADAMA aims to continue providing support and companionship for such groups of people, therefore increasing the quality of their lives.
ADAMA consists of an array of skilled professionals that dedicate their time and expertise by providing activities and therapies in their respective fields. Among them are lawyers, accountants, and therapists who, since 2008, have supported over 800 people in 23 refuges and centers through their alternative means of therapy. They all share the ethos that the provision of emotional support enables people to express themselves, and through functional assistance their problems can be solved.
The award-winning Barcelona based Production Company OTOXO has committed to making a documentary based on ADAMA’s work, told through the eyes of the people who have directly benefited from these helping hands. Reaching the tipping goal of $300 will enable OTOXO improve the final production of the documentary and promote it for maximum exposure. The total funding goal of $1,500 will make it possible to train video production volunteers, maintain the video equipment, and enter the documentary into film festivals all over the world, exposing ADAMA’s work on a global scale.
Please help ADAMA build trust, confidence and self-worth in the lives of socially excluded people by backing the cause and sharing this campaign through your social networks.
Asibi Danjuma
I am a 23-year-old Londoner currently in law school. I have a BA in Politics and International Relations and an LLB in law. I have worked as a Student Facilitator for the British Red Cross, taught at local schools in Berkshire and have done a lot of pro bono legal research for Amnesty International and the Arizona Capital Trials Project. When I finish law school, I hope to start saving the world by working in developmental research and perhaps move to Paris to eat macaroons, dabble in photography and write stories. I’m also an avid reader, white wine drinker and world traveler.
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What good do you want to create? Visit our site to learn about how to start your own campaign.
