Raising funds for Edhi Foundation
Experience of collecting funds:
To contribute in community services for a social cause, a person works with blood, sweat and tears. That is exactly what we did to raise funds for Edhi Foundation that provides community services including shelter for the destitute, free hospitals and medical care, drug rehabilitation services, and national and international relief efforts.
As a group, it was a great experience for all of us with the blend of failures and success stories. Fund raising or collecting donations is not that easy as it seems. We have to build trust with donors that their money is in safe hands and will not be used for a personal scam. Filled with challenges, we learnt a lot including the following lessons:
· Acceptance
· Leadership
· Responsibilities
· Tolerance and courage to face failures
· Persuading skills especially in monetary terms
· Zeal and persistence
· Team work
· Trustworthiness
After the completion of the project, we felt butterflies in our stomach and were filled with joy and satisfaction head over heels. It felt like a huge success.
Woodrow Wilson said: ‘There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.’
Collection of funds:
We gathered funds both with collective and individual efforts. Collectively, it was comparatively easy because we could persuade them in a better way. Individually, we had to convince them giving all the in-depth details and still, not being able to collect funds in the end. In some cases, there was a good response, while in others, we were totally ignored that left us with discouragement for some time. But we did not stop and keep on doing dire efforts.
We reached out to strangers, relatives, friends, organizations like Tazeem-e-Insaniyat Foundation, schools, colleges, local mosques, departmental stores, social media friends and literally everyone we had access to. Our group member, Eraj, designed a poster as well.
Challenges and coping up these challenges
· COVID-19: The biggest challenge was COVID-19 pandemic as it has left a lot of people jobless and in financial crises. Therefore, mostly people refused to aid for this specific reason.
· Scam: The strangers mostly did not believe us. They thought we are just bunch of kids trying to gather money for party. They thought we are a scam or fraud. For this purpose, we designed a posture and next time gave reference to Amal Academy.
· No response: A lot of people delayed the payment saying that we will help you but ended up ghosting us. We coped up with this issue by reaching them out again and again until they provided us with proper answer.
· Rejections: Another factor was of discouragement and grief-stricken feelings in the beginning of the project for being rejected but later we tried to cope up and keep on moving not bothering the failures to a greater extent.
Accepting failure:
At first, we felt disrespected and a bit anxious too for people treating us in such a bad way. But later, we tried to cope up with these situations and tried in different ways possible. This challenged helped us overcome the failures as we encountered defeat number of times that leveled up our tolerance and patience. We accepted failures and worked with persistence with compassion and kindness. Later, it helped us in collecting funds from the people who were not even interested to listen to us.
In the end of 2 weeks, we were able to collect more than 20,000 funds. We were able to do this with the grace of Allah Almighty. Allhumdullilah!
