Healing begins with charity. Collecting funds for Edhi Foundation experience:

“Fundraising is the gentle art of teaching the joy of giving.”

Hank Rosso.

A Great Pakistani humanitarian who founded the EDHI foundation which runs hospitals and orphanages across Pakistan.

Before his death Edhi was registered as a guardian of nearly 20,000 children. The Angel of Mercy, Mr. Edhi is considered as Pakistan’s “most respected” figure.

After the death of Edhi Sahab, the foundation started to face problems. Currently, the charity ratio has dropped by about 25–30%, which is a very drastic drop for a foundation that is functional due to charity. So, Amal Academy decided to fundraise for the foundation through fellows, in the group. Our group decided to organize small fundraising to encourage people to support Edhi’s mission to help everyone. But due to the pandemic,t was quite difficult to reach out to people but alhamdulillah, I and my group mates were very optimistic and we start working online.

Target:

Our target were family members, colleagues, friends, neighbors, and different organizations. Our group first made a status to attract people to donate. But the difficult thing about online people just ignored our status. Many people asked for the verification letter before making the charity and many others diverted their way just to ignore us. First, we created a status on WhatsApp:

But this was not enough because we were not attracting people that much so we decided to make another status but first we created a poster to post on Facebook and WhatsApp:

People who contribute by giving funds:

Alhumdulillah. Our group collected quite a good amount. Most of the people who helped were our family members, friends.

Challenges which we’ve faced while collecting funds online:

There were a lot of challenges that first didn’t appear to be a problem at all, but once we started working we realized how important small things can be. The list of challenges we faced are as follows:

1. Conveying message to donor:

Conveying your message to your donors is the most important aspect of the campaign. We needed to take some time and write a thoughtful, well-written, campaign descriptive post of what were we hoping to achieve. And most importantly tell our audience why this campaign is worth their money.

2. People ignoring our status:

Due to the online approach. People ignored the status and post a lot we had to reach people personally.

3. Members getting demotivated during fundraising campaign:

During this campaign, we got demotivated it was the most difficult thing in the campaign but we overcome it Keeping up with energy and time to Combat this obstacle by creating a Campaign Calendar and sticking to it was not easy, especially when we were collecting funds during the pandemic. Sometimes we didn’t get enough charity from people despite all our efforts, yet it was the purity of the cause that kept us going. Our circle is very supportive we all helped each other to stay motivated.

Approaching an organization for help:

We also approached an organization to help us collect the donation. We are still working with them and trying to collect funds.

Final experience of Circle 5:

For the Edhi fundraising activity, most of our batch mates were very enthusiastic and determined. This experience was moving for us because it showed us a whole different world when you have to collect funds and people are not helping you and it makes us feel that how difficult the job was done by “Abdul Sattar Edhi Sahab”. That he used to stand on the road to collect charity from the people. It’s a huge responsibility and most difficult work not collecting funds but asking for money and getting rejected by people. But we want to Thanks Amal Academy for giving us this opportunity and making us realize how difficult this task is. We will also try to continue doing this as great welfare work.

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

Dr. Jane Goodall.