Fifty4Fifty

It’s been a bit quiet for quite some time in this web site,but rest assured that Fifty4Fifty is still on track and meeting its commitments as 2008 progresses.

Another school year closes in the Philippines end of March and with it the satisfaction that we have together continued to help send 50 deserving boys and girls with their studies.

We had only one big fund-raising campaign in 2007 and that was the Santa’s Corner during the United Nations Women’s Guild Bazaar in early December. This was made possible by the organizational and photographic skills of Dean Calma, the perseverance of Al Sinoy, who was called in to play Santa; the creativity of Lito Cosare, and the full support of Datdat and Awe Ortega, Malou Calma, Robins Chinittala, Kressimir Nikolic, Imed Zabaar, Baby Quevenco, Michelle Quevenco and her friends from the Vienna International School. The event was such a ht that we may think of doing this again next Christmas.

Also throughout the year, family, good friends and casual acquaintances chipped in with generous contributions. Special mention goes to Kressimir, Lolita Lao, Thomas Osabal, Fr. Kevin and David, Carmen Camarata and Datdat and Awe. Their help kept the effort going, particularly at those times when the financial burden seemed most heavy.

A big thank you again to one and all.

We recently received a letter of thanks from one of our students and we would like to share this with you. A scanned image is available by clicking on the thumbnail at the left.

But, just in case that copy is too difficult for you to read, we reprint the full letter below, as-is with no editing.

It goes:

Dear Sirs,

Respectfully Yours,
Rudy Aguilar Cañete

Though not as well-attended as before, setting up a table at the Vienna International School Summer Bazaar last June 9 to sell flea market items garnered some additional funds for Fifty for Fifty.

Items that sold a lot were the hand-made native bracelets from the Philippines – quite fitting I thought as the money was in a way going back there for a different purpose. Others included unused computer accessories that were lying around unwanted in the house anyway. All in all the day’s collection reached slightly more that a hundred euros.

Not bad, come to think of it. We wil probably selling some other stuff at eBay in the coming weeks as part of ongoing fund-raising.

We’ve reached a highlight of sorts!! When school starts in the Philippines in June, a total of 50 young boys and girls will get educational help from the Fifty4Fifty Fund. This mean’s we’ve finally reached our initial goal. So again, many thanks to those of you who were generous enough to help and support this initiative.

The 50 young students are from three provinces in the Philippines. The original 10 are from Batangas and we will be supporting them for the second term this year. A new batch of ten youngsters are from Palawan – names and details to follow soon. And another thirty of the students are from Negros Occidental, particularly my home town of Silay City.

With the goal of selecting 50 young students reached, the challenge now is how to keep the funds coming. I am confident that God will provide and help as long as we help ourselves and that we will be able to sustain this project with your continued support.

It was recently brought to our attention that the www.fifty4fifty.org site was not displaying at all on Internet Explorer browsers – it was fine on Firefox though. Culprit is some badly rendered html code which we’ve fixed now.

Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

The typical school year in the Philippines finishes by the end of March. And thanks to all of you the children above will be finishing a successful year and are on their way to the next level when school opens again in June.

Of the ten children that we initially are helping under the program, one – Melanie – dropped out due to personal reasons. Another child will be taking her place next year. Forty more children will be added to our list in the coming school year, probably 10 from the province of Palawan and 30 from Silay City, Negros Occidental, finally bringing the total number of children we are helping to 50.

Many, many thanks from the children! We hope we can count on your continued support in the coming months.

If you’ve paid close attention you may have noticed that the site logo and slogan has changed for quite some time.

The new logo, courtesy of Karina Tischlinger is in Web 2.0 specs and features a book behind the number 4 to illustrate that this is all about providing education. In the process, we’ve also replaced the cheesy slogan to something we think is more appropriate, “Helping out. Fifty at a time.”

The change of the logo is in preparation for an online charity store that we would soon be opening with cafepress.com to help raise additional funds for the project. Items for sale would include t-shirts with the logo, calendar, postcards, posters and other souvenir-like items.

There’s a preview of the store here.