Budgets. (an opportunity to help!)

I love my job. It is stressful and crazy and sometimes irritating, but in the end, I konow that I'm doing something worthwhile. The best part has been that I'm not really responsible for "maintaining" our projects - I can't fundraise a dime to save my life - and I have a really hard time with the missionary culture of personal fundraising, so my salary helps me live within my means and not go overboard. (But that is probably a conversation we should have over coffee and not a monologue I should have on my blog).

Futuro Lleno de Esperanza has grown so much - three years ago we started with 23 kids. We now have 100, plus programs going on to enrich education in the whole community. The building of a new public school have us re-structuring to meet the needs of our people, but it's clear that FLE is really a benefit to our little piece of the world.

Whenever I think that we aren't doing a good job, or we aren't doing enough, I get reminded that even the little things make an impact.

Because of our growth, we are a little short on the budget for this calendar year. It's a seemingly irrelevant amount of money, but $900 we're short is needed to cover a ton of expenses.

Nine hundred dollars could check off any of the following list items in our budget:

1 month of teacher salaries

3 months of medical insurance for the entire staff
3 months of paid maternity leave for pre-school teacher and her substitute 

6 months of specialty classes (karate, art)

50 school day lunches

69 days of nutritional snack

So, as much as I hate fundraising, and I've said it here before that I hate using the blog to ask for help (I just hate asking for help, period).  We are  running an indiegogo campaign to try to raise the last few bucks that we need, and I'm asking you, blog readers and friends of the Dominican Republic, to consider donating a few (or many) dollars to help us continue offering quality, innovative education to a community in need. Your money will be put to good use, and every last cent that we receive (there are fees for the indiegogo campaign) will go directly to Colegio Futuro Lleno de Esperanza's school programs in Cienfuegos, Santiago!