April 14, 2009
Dear student group leader:
Thank you for helping to support the Belaku Trust. We are sure that after exploring what the Belaku Trust does in the communities it serves and how much the fundraiser-sales help the women who make these products, you will find this endeavor worthwhile. Not only are you raising money to support women in rural India, but through this fundraiser-sale you will gain managerial, organizational, and financial skills for your future careers.
The purpose of this Toolkit is to help you and your group organize a sale to benefit the communities the Belaku Trust serves, building off of the lessons we have learned. This Toolkit is intended to supplement a Needs Assessment and Final Report created as part of a project for a financial management class at the Boston University School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. It contains information that didn’t fit into either report: how to plan the sale, maintain an accurate data collection system, and give the money to Belaku, for example.
The Needs Assessment provides information on the history of the Belaku Trust, the other programs Belaku runs, and the state of their three income generation projects. For more resources on Belaku, look at the Belaku-produced info sheet and pamphlets, and notes from a conversation with Dr. Ganapathy, the Executive Director of the Belaku Trust, in the Links to Resources section.
The Final Report provides information on the Belaku sales we’ve done this semester, which themselves are informally built off of the lessons learned in two previous sales with the Undergraduate Public Health Association at Boston University. It details how we ran our sales, our results, the lessons we learned, and recommendations for future sales.
We encourage you to talk to Dr. Ganapathy. In addition to being very knowledgeable, she can give a sense of what life in rural Karnataka is like from a local perspective and detail how these fundraiser-sales help the women in the income generation projects. On top of that, she’s really personable and friendly.
One of the unique qualities about Belaku is that it’s a very grassroots organization. The money that you are helping to raise doesn’t go to administrative costs, but directly to the women themselves. One of our roles in conducting these sales is to bridge geographic and socioeconomic gaps by giving the women who make these artisan products access to the markets we live in. While everyone has different intents and purposes conducting a charitable fundraiser-sale, we hope that through reading these materials and (possibly) talking with Dr. Ganapathy, you will gain a tangible appreciation for how the Belaku Trust helps the people it serves.
Sincerely,
Alexander Ko, Kate Laporte, Daniela Macander, & Devina Patel
