We started off week two with Facity’s story. Facity is the mom for the first family we worked with in Kenya.
Then, you get your first introduction to Anita, our Community Director in Bomet. She has been our boots on the ground there for the past 4 1/2 years, and is an incredible leader!
It was three years ago this month that we left for back to back expeditions in Kenya with 26 people on the two teams. Looking back on that, we were definitely crazy! We really didn’t know what we were doing, but got on that plane with faith that it would all work out.
And, it did.
Here we are, three years later, about to leave on the 13th expedition to Kenya for 100 Humanitarians. By the end of this trip, we will have taken 180 people to Kenya. About 20% have come more than once, and Melodee will have come 5 times!
Over those three years, we have worked with 50+ families, teaching them gardening skills, and providing goats, chickens, and cows for self-reliance and economic development. Our team has worked in 9 different communities, providing Days for Girls kits to over 4000 women and girls in schools and rescue centers. We have sponsored 30 kids in school, with 4 graduates and two more at the end of 2019. We have built two training centers in Bomet and Nkareta, to provide a central area for the families in our communities to learn to read and write, along with skills such as thermal cooking, first aid, and basic mending. We have started and helped develop two sewing centers that employ over a dozen families. We have held 5 big fundraising events, monthly sew-a-thons to make underwear, t-shirt dresses, and t-shirt bags, and have organized 6 Savers for School fees FUNDrives to raise money to help students in Kenya.
What’s Next
Our next team heads to Kenya in a few weeks, and we have some big projects to do!
1. Planting 50,000 trees, combining SeedballsKenya and seedlings. 2. Building a chicken coop at our mentoring center to provide chickens and eggs to local families. 3. Distributing 200 Days for Girls reusable feminine hygiene kits in two schools. 4. Providing School Fees for 25 students for their 3rd term in school for 2019. 5. Planting 20 garden towers for families to provide vegetables and nutrition for ten families. 6. Building a water storage system at our training center to provide clean water and capture rainwater. 7. Provide goats for milk for ten families.
If you would like to contribute to this fundraiser, you can do so on Facebook, or on our website.
Save the Date: HumaniJam 2019
We will be hosting HumaniJam 2019 on Monday, September 30th to wrap up our September of Service initiative. Save the date! We can’t tell you yet who will be performing this year, but you are definitely going to want to be there! Details will be announced soon!
Upcoming Projects: 50,000 Trees
It is getting drier every year in Kenya, and we are working with other organizations to plant millions of trees over the next 5 years. We can do this by throwing Kenya Seedballs on our expeditions, that are indigenous trees that will grow quickly. Our goal is 50,000 trees per expedition. We have four expeditions a year, so in 5 years, that is one million trees!
Our May $5 Friday Fundraiser is for all of the projects that we are working on in June on our expedition! See our list above. We are fundraising $10,000 and are 20% funded right now. 100% of your donations will go to these projects!
We had a successful April FUNDrive, and now have begun gathering items for our August 2019 drive! If you are having a yard sale this summer, instead of taking your leftovers to D.I. or Savers, bring them to us!
100 Humanitarians International would not be possible without you. We are an all volunteer team, and we don’t pay salaries (not even in Kenya!) so all of our fundraising can go towards the self-reliance and economic development projects we focus on. We are so grateful for every dollar donated, every bag of clothing, every event that you participate in, and every prayer. Asante sana, rafikis!
The days went by, and we started planning a concert to be held on The Maasai Mara. I had become friends with Stephen Leken on Facebook, a very popular Maasai Gospel singer. We were also able to have another singer, Pastor Ben, whom we later began working with on projects in his community. Then, one day, Moses said, “I wonder if we could get Lemarti to perform.” Lemarti is a Samburu performer with a Bob Marley Reggae vibe, and we listen to his music a lot on our expeditions. It turned out that Lemarti was in the U.S. at the time, so Moses started chatting with him, and finally we came up with an agreement for him to perform at the concert. We were at a Mexican restaurant when it all came together. Suddenly, Moses got a very funny look on his face. He turned his phone around, and showed me the Alex Boye video “Circle of Life” featuring LEMARTI. What?! How was this happening?! But first, we had A Taste of Kenya to host, and the week of the event, Alex called me and we arranged to film Promised Land the day of the event. It would include shukas and a potbelly pig and walking around downtown Salt Lake City. Behind the scenes, it was hilarious watching people get all excited about the pig, and want to pet the pig, when there were two Africans in full shuka (the Maasai dress) standing there. I heard maybe one person say, “I think that’s Alex Boye.”
The best part of the day was ending up at A Taste of Kenya, and surprising the attendees with the news that they were going to be in an Alex Boye video that night! We had amazing performers at that event. Cactus Jack and Jenn Marco both performed, along with WOFA Afro Fusion. We wound up the night singing Karaoke and dancing and it was a really fun party.
We also raised money for families in Kenya to receive cows and goats, in addition to school fees and reusable feminine hygiene kits!
We get asked often how to run a Facebook Fundraiser, because in the past year they have been very successful for us. We began our monthly $5 Friday Fundraisers in July 2018. Prior to that, we would have $5 Friday Fundraisers in our 100 Humanitarians International Facebook group, but because of analytics, it wouldn’t get seen very much. We were driving donations to our website and not right on Facebook. We launched our first $5 Friday Fundraiser with a goal to raise the funds for 300 Days for Girls reusable feminine hygiene kits. It was hugely successful, and we were able to fund the remaining kits we needed to donate to girls in Kenya for 2018. Our goal with our Facebook Fundraisers, is to also build our 100 Humanitarians International Facebook Group and Facebook Page.
1. Choose a Cause
When you choose a nonprofit to fundraise for on Facebook, 100% of your donation goes to that nonprofit. When you choose a specific person or project outside of a nonprofit, the fees are taken out. Funds are not sent until generally 45-70 days after your fundraiser ends, so be aware of that. This is not a fast way to fundraise, so plan a few months in advance if you can. We recommend organizations where at least 75% of your donation or more goes to projects and not to salaries.
2. Choose a Project
If you are choosing a nonprofit, try to determine where your fundraising efforts will go. Is it towards a project, is it administrative costs? People are more likely to donate, if it is to something specific. For example, when someone does a birthday fundraiser for 100 Humanitarians International on Facebook, I always ask them where they want the funds to go, once we receive them. We have four different areas that we fundraise for:
Facebook has default pictures for fundraisers that have nothing to do with the nonprofit or cause you are raising funds for. We recommend gathering pictures and stories that you want to use, to help people understand why you are fundraising, what the cause means to you, and how you would like it to help. The more often you post during your fundraiser, the more likely it is to show up in the newsfeeds of the people you have invited to participate. We recommend that if you are going to host a fundraiser to make the commitment to post at least 3 times a week during the duration.
4. Choose the Length of Time
We have found that the best length of time for $250-500 fundraisers is about two weeks, and above that is around four weeks.
5. Thank Every Donor!
Facebook will notify you, as the host, when someone donates. You can go in and thank every single donor and personalize it. We also like to keep track of the people who have donated on a spreadsheet, so that we can contact them to show them where their money went, invite them to events and to go on expeditions, and to invite them to fundraisers in the future.
We hope this gives you some ideas! To see where our $5 Facebook Fundraiser donations go, and to get notified of new monthly fundraisers, join our Facebook Group!
Do you want to come to Kenya? Check out our Expeditions!
