Sharing Foundation: College Sponsorship Program
I just set up a ChipIn page and widget (see above) to help raise money for an NGO, the Sharing Foundation that supports children in Cambodia. I'm on the board. One of its many programs is the college sponsorship program. My family and I have been sponsoring a young woman, Leng Sopharath for college (annual contribution $750 per year) and hope to be able to support her until graduation. We can't afford to do it alone and usually send out requests to family and friends to join us in supporting her.
What ChipIn allows us to do with the widget and page is do this grassroots fundraising via my blog.
It was very easy to set up! The service is still in beta, so there were still some minor glitches. I use typepad, so I wanted place the widget in the sidebar of my blog as well. The standard pixel sizes for the widget did not fit properly in my side bar -- mostly because I had to insert it as an item in a linklist and the link list indents. I tried editing the code width and height, but it didn't work. The narrow size didn't work for me because the name of the organization wouldn't fit. I'd also like to see a more automatic installation such as what is available here.
Otherwise, pretty amazing!
ChipIn is a great idea! I won't chip in this month, but will try very hard before Jan 1.
It's not just ChipIn that's so cool, it's what you're doing. The investment in Leng Sopharanth will pay out over a long term. Most people get that in the abstract. What your Flickr page and blog provide is some evidence right now. That makes all the difference. Many to many media make it possible to be involved in the lives of real individuals.
Until recently sponsorships were so costly to administer. But now you've set up a good system with the help of Web tools which allows good confidence that all of our small contributions will go towards what's really important.
Posted by: John Powers | November 06, 2006 at 02:58 PM
Save the world one person at a time. Yeah. Brava.
Posted by: Jan | November 14, 2006 at 07:37 AM
I want to know more about the sponsorship program. I also wanted to know the process of getting a sponsor
Posted by: Jatavia Thomas | June 13, 2007 at 04:42 PM