Thanks to your generous support, the new year is off to a fantastic start for between 150 and 200 women and girls and their families in Kandahar!
Donations of all sizes have combined to enable the Canadian International Learning Foundation (CanILF) to exceed our 12 Days of Learning goal, raising a total of $10,000 and unlocking the $15,000 matching grant from the Cadmus Foundation. Most importantly, your gifts have allowed the women’s morning education program to enter 2013 with a full year of funding in place ($45,000) to cover the core operating costs of the Afghan Canadian Community Center in Kandahar.
This means students and teachers can go into their morning English, Computing and Communications courses confident that the classes will continue. It also puts CanILF volunteers in a better position to seek out new partners and funding sources to help students thrive at this highly-respected school.
Your generosity also proves to large donor agencies – such as the US State Department, which provides most of funding for the Kandahar Institute of Modern Studies (KIMS), the ACCC’s parent organization – that the Insititute has widespread international support from charities and individual donors alike. This kind of support can play a critical role in helping us renew our current grant, and give KIMS the time needed to achieve self-sustainability. The morning program will educate 150 to 200 girls and women. Overall, the Institute expects to provide vital education for between 1,500 to 1,800 women and men in Kandahar this year.
Having exceeded the 12 Days of Learning campaign goal by more than $1,300, the additional funds will allow us to start working toward funding the program through to the end of 2015 and, if possible, fund even more student scholarships in 2013. Donations that exceeded our goal also became the first to count towards our next matching grant, as the Cadmus Foundation will provide another $15,000 match once we raise an additional $30,000. This means that going forward your donations will continue to have an even greater impact!
We are very grateful for every donor as well as the volunteers who created and promoted the zero-cost 12 Days of Learning campaign. My sincere thanks as well to all of you who shared the information with your friends and family; we were introduced to many first-time supporters as a result. This volunteer support will also allow us to use 100% of donations received to fund scholarships and purchase educational equipment.
Thank you as well to the Luke Four Foundation for their generous donation last month, which also supports women’s education in Kandahar and got us off on a great start as we successfully raised our first $30,000. We are also deeply honoured by the support of Capt. Trevor Greene and the Greene Family Education Initiative Fund, which contributed $1,000 this December to CanILF’s programming at the ACCC.
To those of you who are new to us, welcome and thank you! Visit www.canilf.org to learn more about CanILF’s volunteer-run work to support education in regions of poverty, war or illness. You can also contact me any time, or connect with us on Facebook for CanILF and the Afghan School Project.
Lastly, I would like to share the words of Ms. Yelda Mahmoud, a former ACCC student now living in Canada, who donated to the Campaign.
Yelda wrote: “Educate a woman and you will educate a nation.”
Wishing you and our students great things for 2013,
Ryan Aldred
President
Canadian International Learning Foundation