An overdue update

Time has run away with me lately and I seem to have got out of the habbit of posting to my blog, so it's time to put that right and put some of my thoughts on-line again.

Since my last post quite a bit has happened which I should update you on, beginning with the magnificent response we received to the crisis in Kenya following last December's disputed Presidential election. I have pushed out a couple of updates on the news pages of the web site and via the mailing list, but I will summarise again here...

Firstly I have to say a huge 'thank you' to everyone who gave to our crisis appeal. We were very gratified with the response we received and were able to put the money raised to good use. The appeal raised over £12,000 - which probably doesn't sound like a lot, but for a charity of our size it certainly was very helpful. We were able to respond with some immediate short term aid for the many displaced familes and children in the form of clothing, food and education. But the main thrust of the aid we gave was in re-housing families who had fled their homes either because they were destroyed, or because their lives were in danger. Thanks to your generosity we were able to re-home some 150 families and take many children out of immediate harms way.

I should sound a word of thanks for our staff at this point. Many of our team and associates in Nairobi put themselves into very difficult and dangerous situations to help the many innocent people caught up in the political violence. Without naming them all I do want to express my sincere thanks for a magnificent job. Thankfully the political situation is much calmer now thanks to a power sharing agreement that was reached. Our work had been severely disrrupted because of the danger of travelling around the country but, for us at least, things are back to normal now.

For my next update I turn my thoughts to our Annual General Meeting, which was held in July in Manchester. The turn-out was not so good this year and our Board needs to think about this for next year - whether we continue with the same format / location, or do something different. However, for those of you that came I was very grateful for your support and it was good to meet you there. For me there were two highlights of the meeting... Firstly from the Trustee's report I was able to share what a good year we had last year from a financial perspective. Giving had increased tremendously, pushing our income over a quarter of a million pounds for the first time. Some of this was thanks to the aforementioned appeal, some to the funds raised from the Mount Kenya Challenge, and some from a couple of generous one-off gifts. But, whichever way you look at it our supporters have been very generous and have our sincere gratitude. I will post a copy of the Trustees report on the web site shortly so you can download it if you wish.

The second AGM highlight was an extract from a Video that our supporter Chris Lynwode has made of the Mount Kenya Challenge. It is a personal video diary, but it does give a really good idea of the difficulty of the challenge, as well as some really good thumbnails of our work generally. Please drop me a line (or email info @ vision-africa.org) if you would like a copy of the video - it is professionally made and Chris is selling it at £8.99 a time, all proceeds of which go to Vision Africa.

There's so much else to share, but I don't want to bore you so let me just consider two more things in my musings...

Firstly, I am sometimes asked what people can do to help Vision Africa. It's easy to give a glib answer at this point, but there are a lot of needs just now. We always need more funding and more sponsors, so if you can help with spreading the word about Vision Africa, or with running a fundraising event please do. I would like to put a resources pack together for this, but for now I would just remind you that one of the key differentiators about Vision Africa is our low cost model which means that our UK overheads are generally less than 1% of our income. This may change in the future as we do need to consider employing someone as we grow, but we will always strive to keep this as low as possible. Which leads me to the question of whether you could support us in other ways? We particularly need help in the areas of fundraising and publicity - perhaps you have expertise in these fields and would like to volunteer for us? Or maybe you have other skills that you would like to share with us? Please get in touch if you would like to help.

Secondly, we are a non-denominational Christian charity and I was challenged about what this means at the AGM. I thought I would take a couple of minutes to clarify this in my words... Firstly, it means that our key staff and Board members are Christians and attend church regularly. It also means that we bring strong moral and ethical values to all that we do because we apply biblical principles of honesty and integrity to our work. I hope that doesn't sound high handed or judgemental? I think it should mean that you should be able to just trust us a little more because we see what we do as a ministry in compassion, rather than a business enterprise. That's not to imply that non-Christian charities are less trustworthy, just that we have certain standards that we will not compromise. However, that said I also would emphasize what it does not mean... Ours is not a Christian outreach mission, it is not about preaching or teaching the Christian message - other than by practical compassion. Our work is squarely and solely aimed at providing relief aid, support and protection for children in desparate need. We support any child with a need regardless of religion, race, tribe or colour. It's all about giving children a brighter future that would otherwise be denied to them. I hope these are principles that resonate with you.

Lastly, I have recently been looking at redesigning our web site (yes, I am also the 'webmaster') to give it a fresh new look. I decided to make it standards compliant (XHTML1.0 Strict for those of you that understand these things) and it was at that point that I realised how much I had to learn and how badly the existing site is coded! I think this is going to be a labour of love and will probably take me many months to complete, but watch this space and I will post an occasional update on how I'm getting on. Of course, if you are a web designer with some knowledge of coding in XHTML and PHP/SQL and would like to volunteer to help - Please let me know!!

Well, I think that's enough for now. I'll try not to leave it so many months before my next update. I'm putting a reminder into my diary to try to do a monthly update!

Bob.