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Fundraising
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Our goal is to build 4-6 plants in the next year to provide clean water for 15,000 people. This will cost approximately $300,000
We will divide our fundraising efforts into three categories. Outreach as it relates to fundraising includes placing information about AguaClara in places where potential donors can see it such as with the Cornell Annual Fund. Contacts means actively exploring personal and professional relationships to help us find potential donors. Grant applications and direct solicitations includes the actual requests for money. This step epitomizes the phrase "one who does not cry gets no milk." We need to raise money for construction of plants in Honduras, research and design work at Cornell and to send AguaClara engineers to Honduras to help train and educate Hondurans on water treatment process.
Microfinance
What is Microcredit?
The provision of small loans or microcredit to poor people to help them engage in productive activities including growth of very small businesses is called Microcredit. The term may also include a broader range of services, including credit, savings, and insurance.
Organizations that currently offer Microcredit in Honduras?
Name Website
Adelante http://www.adelantefoundation.org/
Finca Honduras http://www.villagebanking.org
Finsol http://www.finsolhn.com/
Fundahmicro http://www.fundahmicro.hn/fundahmicro/
FUNED http://www.funedvf.org/ingles/
ODEF http://www.odef.org.hn/
Worldrelief https://community.wr.org/SSLPage.aspx?pid=609
Microcredit projects that already exist in Central America
In general Microcredit projects can range anything between lending to an individual to implementing a project which would help the whole community at large (generally with the aid of the government or a Non-governmental charitable institution). The current Microcredit projects in Central America are mainly concentrated on Small size businesses. Microcredit in Central America has been growing at a steady pace of 20% in the last decade with Honduras among the lower end of growth spectrum.
How Microcredit works?
All the Microfinance organizations in Honduras seem to follow the Grameen model for lending purposes, in this model an organization assigns a number of officers to a community to familiarize with the situations on ground and gather loan applications. Once the loan applications are reviewed they decide on potential borrowers (usually the limit is 5 people) and form a group of with all them as members. Then they give money to 2 members of the group (the loan could range from anything between $50 to $5000) and monitor repayments for a two year period. If the two borrowers do return the money on time they extend the loans to everybody else in the group, this dynamics creates a peer pressure among the borrowers to make payments on time.
How Microcredit can be used to help AguaClara?
The best way would be to convince different villages in Honduras to form commercial Water boards and use them as representatives to apply for the Microcredit loans in lieu for paybacks based on the collection of water taxes from each individual family in the village. Since many of the Honduras villages already have a water board and most of them keep tax records it would be easier for the Microcredit institution to verify their credit worthiness and provide them the initial investment required to build the water treatment plant and pay the AguaClara/APP employees working on the project.
Outreach
The Cornell Annual Fund plans on including information about AguaClara in their mailings and hopefully we can get a link about AguaClara on the Cornell Fund website. Other ideas for outreach for fundraising purposes includes posters on campus and continued contact with previous donors.
To develop a solid external face we need to do a good job of developing the wiki and finding someone to devote whose sole job is to work on making the wiki more accessible.
We will to sign up for the following events:
Reunion: Sign up is in the next two weeks for a table this June
Homecoming:
Trustee Council Meeting next fall
We need to make presentations at Cornell clubs in NYC, Syracuse and other places. When people go home for breaks or if people have jobs over the summer they can make presentations at their local Cornell clubs. We can have a training session at the end of the year or before spring break to encourage this. In order to set this up we will contact the alumni affairs liason from each club and ask them about the most effective time and places to makes these presentations.
Contacts
We should continue to actively explore personal and professional contacts as ways of gaining information about potential funding sources. We should makes contacts with the Honduran and possibly other Central American embassies in Washington D.C. We should also meet with the USAID mission and U.S. Embassy in Honduras to explore possibilities.
We need to work with alumni affairs and development specifically Jessica Traynor the alumni affairs officer for enginnering. She will help us use the alumni network. We will specifically look for Cornell alum working for foundations and other potential donors agencies.
We will schedule meetings with people at Cornell ranging from professors who may have contacts at donor agencies to people who work in alumni development to obtain advice and ideas related to outreach and development.
We will develop a generic form letter and marketing that we can start sending to companies, foundations and alumni.
We will get in touch with Johnson School's Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise and let them know what we are doing. We might be able to get some money/advice from them
We will explore ways to find MBA students to work on the projects. One possibility might be Park fellows who are MBA students who do a project with a focus on sustainability. They get to choose a project to work on so we could present to them and hopefully we can get one to help us out.Clint Sydel is the director of the Park fellowship and may be a helpful contact
Grants
We have assembled a database of potential grants using the foundation directory which can be found at http://fconline.fdncenter.org/ and http://www.grants.gov/applicants/get_registered.jsp.
A Grant Short List of grants that we think AguaClara has a good chance of obtaining right now has been created.
We will look for grants with applications that may be appropriate for AguaClara especially focusing on grants that may be similar to each other so that we can write one grant application and use it multiple times.
We will explore grants from the Global Development Alliance through USAID for potential sources of advice and funding.
Strategy
Below you will find a summary of our fundraising efforts in each of the areas of concentration. You will also find an explanation of Microfinance as well as the benefits it may hold for AguaClara.
Corporate Fundraising
Starting in Fall 2009, corporate fundraising was a new area of focus for the outreach team. An initial list of prospective companies has been compiled and stored in the Outreach folder of the documents section in the aguaclara gmail account. This spreadsheet will help record and monitor our progress. To avoid redundancy and make the process more seamless for future outreach teams, please keep detailed notes of interactions and update contact information as you go on the prospect spreadsheet in the AguaClara gmail account.
Two brief points about fundraising from corporations. First, identify your target with a purpose in mind, in other words think about out why a company would want to support AguaClara or how they might benefit from helping us. You could randomly pick out some fortune 500 companies, but spending some time researching and answering these questions will help you be more effective. Second, fundraising is about developing relationships. Sending a letter is simply the beginning. Most of the work is in the follow up, which can be a slow, arduous and even frustrating process. The powerpoint on corporate fundraising has more information. Of course, clear any company with Monroe prior to initiating contact.
In Fall 2010, limited success was achieved in corporate sponsorship research. The team ran into some difficulties because we do not have 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. In the future, asking for specific donations may be more effective as some companies may be more inclined to donate materials rather than money.
Grants
Finding and applying to grants are a key function of the AguaClara Outreach Team. Below are links to a database and a summary of grant applications that have been completed. Attached to the grant application page are those specific applications we have submitted.
As members of such a unique organization, we must look into a wider gamut of grants. We look for grants that we can tailor to any of the many facets of the project. For our current efforts in creating a series of generic grants for future use, please look at the Grant Text Modules.
We search for potential grants using a variety of websites such as:
A Grant Short List has been created, as well as a more comprehensive Grant Database, showcasing the most current grant applications that the team is working on.
Aside from ensuring that the grants we seek are in accordance with AguaClara's ethical code, the Outreach team has also written guidelines for grant writing, facilitating the grant writing process for future Outreach members.
Contacts
The Outreach Team is actively involved in developing relationships with potential donors as well as finding contacts within funding agencies that can advocate for AguaClara within their respective organizations. These organization contacts can yield potential sources of funding as well as opportunities for a press release.
For a complete list of organizations and individuals we have contacted as well as examples of letters we have written to them, please refer to the Outreach Contacts and Outreach Contact Letters page. These letters are valuable resources to team members as they provide guidelines for the level of professionalism expected in all AguaClara correspondences.
Microfinance
Even though the potential applications of Microcredit to fund the building, maintaining and commercializing Aguaclara plants is immense the difficulties associated with organizing a community of people to apply for Microcredit, the time between application for funding and receiving the money and the size of funding provided by the Microcredit organizations is a barrier. After deliberation in class for now we have decided to put a hold on further exploration of Microcredit as a funding option and focus more on traditional funding sources like Grants (as of Spring 2010). More information about microcredit and Agua Clara can be found on the Microfinance pageFor insite into how to write a grant a Grant Writing Guidelines page has been created.