(Tom and Miranda)
For all of you who followed our trip last year via this blog, you will remember the time we spent volunteering in iNzinga, and the incredible impact the people there had on us. As many of you know, we left there determined to continue making a difference.
Over the last seven months we have spent evenings, weekends, holidays, and many other spare hours working on the best way for us to provide the help needed in the village. Our initial inclination was to find an existing non-profit to support that could deliver the sort of hand-up that would be strong and focused enough to lift the people of this village back onto their feet. We felt supporting an existing organization would be the best way for us to do that. In the end, we realized that we were in the best position to develop and deliver the consistent, focused effort needed. So, today, we launched Isipho.
You may remember Amahle, the two-year-old daughter of our host, who bonded with Miranda, and gave Miranda the nickname, Isipho, which means "gift" in Zulu. We registered the URL for www.isipho.org before we left South Africa, but we did not know at the time what it would turn into. Isipho will focus on two of the core causes of poverty there; lack of food security, and illiteracy. Through family and community food gardens, we will create a sustainable food supply which will end malnutrition in the village within five years. And, by providing education materials for each grade in iNzinga, we will drastically reduce childhood illiteracy during the same period. Please read about our programs here.
We have our IRS 501(c)(3) status, meaning we are formally a non-profit (incorporated in the state of Georgia), and contributions to Isipho are tax deductible. And, we also start Isipho with Cedara College of Agriculture (the main agricultural college in the area) as a partner to help us provide the gardening education that is lacking in iNzinga. And, we have already partnered with Shuter and Shooter Publishers to provide grade-specific books for the schools in iNzinga. We are well on our way to meeting all of our first year goals.
Now we need funds. And this is a difficult time to raise funds. So, if you can, please visit www.isipho.org, learn about the situation in iNzinga and our plans. If you feel Isipho is a cause worth supporting, and you are in a position to donate anything at all, please visit our donation page and contribute.
If you can not contribute at this time, there is still a lot you can do to help:
- Link to isipho.org on your Facebook, MySpace or other personal page
- Become a fan of Isipho on Facebook
- Friend Isipho on Flickr
- Put our Twitpay.me widget on your Twitter profile
- Follow Isipho news on Twitter
- Write about Isipho on your blog
- Tweet about Isipho
- Email your friends or forward this blog post.
We will occasionally update this blog, but are going to update Isipho mostly via an Isipho.org blog we hope to launch soon, and online social sites like Facebook and Twitter. We appreciate you following along.
Ngiyabonga! Thank you!
