By Sven Mauleon | Cofounder
Report, October 28, NongKhai
Thanks to many friends and supporters, we are able to go on working during and preparing for A.C. After Covid!
We hope to see many volunteers come back after Covid! With the funds raised, we prepare for after Covid! We collaborate with a local school with many orphans and relocate our Thai Training Center in NongKhai there, with space for training/learning, including online, an English library, organic gardening and dorms for trainees, camper students and volunteers.
We call 2020, the year of the ‘black swan’!
Covid disrupted activities and upset plans.Early this year volunteers worked with our trainees and schools. Then our volunteers were forced to go back. Our trainees from Laos had to return home. Now the border is closed.
Other volunteers produced great videos and leaflets. And our trainees prepared maintenance and cleaning, health and hygiene and an organic garden plans even a little BBQ shop! We worked on an Online Charity Shop for village weavers
Volunteers helped us prepare for Google Grants, a chance to promote our work online and helped with asking for volunteer reviews. As a result we are now listed on https://greatnonprofits.org ! We worked on fundraising with GlobalGiving. Volunteer friends Shireen and Arif/Kauser from the UK helped fundraise. We thank all generous donors! Volunteers Jessica, Alice and Christian arranged a special and successful fundraising in Switzerland! And we were invited to a Riot Games campaign. Impact Assets, Riot Games and GlobalGiving nominated OMP to take part in it. Riot Game players around the world had fundraised and were to vote for their favorite NGOs. OMP was one of three NGOs in Southeast Asia!
We did no spring camps. A pity, since young executives from Cisco, the American tech company, had contacted us and the Nongkhai Province Education was enthusiastic to host camps! Covid intervened!A group of village children however came to stay at our Center in April and asked by the NongKhai Non-Formal Education we did had camps in July for village adults and drop out students. Our trainee alumni, James, Tew, and Namthip now joined as volunteers! Tew is now an English teacher. James is back from a Fulbright scholarship to the US. Namthip is on a break from her studies in China. It was great to see them come back as volunteers!
In September, we had another camp at the school that we move to. This time James with his university friend from Bangladesh, Din, trainee alumni Meena from Laos, and Nut from Udon Rajabat Teacher College. Tew joined too.
It has been an intense and unpredictable 2020. We need to use funds raised wisely. We had discussed relocating our center with a school we have helped for many years. They offered us to set up a new center there. We have now moved there!
Cisco contacted us again in August! This time from Asia and Australia. Would Openmind Projects want their help, volunteers, maybe a long-term partner? As a result, 15 of our talented trainee alumni now work with a team of five volunteers from Cisco. The objective is to suggest best ways for OMP to adapt to working online and for the trainees to train to help schools to use online education opportunities with OpenmindProjects and volunteers. These trainees are now university students, a filmmaker, teacher or study to be a teacher in Thailand, Laos, even Australia and one trainee is now studying IT at a university in Sweden!
We will and hope to engage many other volunteer friends too, as online volunteers for our center, camps and schools/students and teachers.We are already developing an online platform, a virtual Training Center, where volunteers, trainees, campers, teachers, supporters can meet, learn, teach and exchange ideas.
Our ambition is to launch three projects for 2021
Our talented alumni are giving back while they improve themselves, English, online solutions, with the help of Cisco. A boost to future careers. We are thankful, excited and lucky to be able work on these projects thanks to generous donors like you. To find the best ways to help poor young people in Southeast Asia, after Covid.
Many thanks from OpenmindProjects!
PS
If you are interested in more information and in following our work, please email info@openmindprojects.net or WhatsApp +66 87 233 5734 or +66 63 313 1879.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
