I’m incredibly excited to tell you about this new project I just started working on! It’s been a long time dream of mine to build a field and sports league for kids who can’t afford to play sports. On January 10, our non-profit Equipped 4 Life committed to building a turf field and funding ten years of sports equipment and coaching for a local community in Haiti. The field and league will be located at Institute Edeline, a free school for orphaned, homeless, and poor children from the surrounding area. The field will also be used by non-student children on the weekends. As part of the process we have set off to raise $100,000 to fund it all! I’m creating this newsletter to keep friends, family, and colleagues up to date about our progress through this journey.
We hit the ground running and we are off to a fast start. We got Project Edeline on board with our idea and have already found a viable candidate to build the field (we’ll be looking at others in the following weeks). Currently, I am in the process of talking to corporations who could donate large amounts of sports equipment to our cause. Two Mondays ago we had our first meeting and now have our first 35 ambassadors who are dedicated to reach our fundraising goal. We have established a solid management team, filled with students who are passionate about their work and are taking a lot of initiative in their respective areas. And we have already completed the first phase of two of our fundraisers.
In the two local fundraisers, we raised over $600 from selling donuts and $1,002 from selling cookies, brownies, and rice crispy treats. Now 8 ambassadors who participated in these fundraisers are each going to send 40 to 50 emails to friends and family, asking for a matching or other donation. We expect this to expand the total dollars raised from the two local activities by at least 10 times. Our team has five more fundraisers planned for the next few weeks, including one to help clean up our community!
As you can tell, I am excited about this project and all our progress already. I hope it's okay if I send you updates from time to time.