Turn Up the Heat!
April in Cambodia is known as the hottest month of the year. We hope that remains true this year as temperatures skyrocketed through April, leaving most everyone incapable of even moving some days - much less quickly. We are thrilled to welcome a new month not just for cooling rains, but also because it is…..Match it May!
As you know, May is when your contributions can be doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled by a match from donors within our support network of businesses here and around the world.
These contributions are set aside to fund our operating costs for twelve months. This includes rent, water, electricity, office supplies, petrol, phones, and all the stuff that keeps any business going.
It doesn’t sound as exciting as home and toilet builds, swim lessons, bikes, music classes, and bands! But we’d be unable to do any of those things without the equipment, paper, glue, and tuk-tuks. They are Heartprint’s petrol.
Take a basic laptop like the one Pheap uses. She does all of our taxes (yes, NGOs in Cambodia pay taxes), and all of the paperwork for staff medical insurance. She produces the medical registration forms for our Community Centre kids and so many other things. But. Pheap’s keyboard has a few keys that aren’t working, so she is always trying to find a workaround. She gets the job done - just more slowly. Unfortunately, we cannot repair or replace her keyboard without the income from Match-it-May.
Then there is our put-upon and worthy printer! We rely on it to produce the worksheets and program plans for all of our Community Centre programmes. It prints the list of names and the forms for when the medical teams come for the check-ups. It prints the patterns women use in our Build a Future programme. Every day it needs yet more paper, and, well, everyone knows how much printer toner costs! Sometimes, it gets tired and needs repairs.
You know how we rely on many photos to show you what we are doing at Heartprint? In our Community Centre we are also very visual and use our big whiteboards for almost everything: English classes, Khmer tutoring, music, and Youth Group. Literally, every programme uses a whiteboard. And thus, whiteboard markers. We often laugh and say that while they are so useful, they are also the bane of our existence because we go through so many boxes!
And glue sticks? Goodness, don’t even get us started!
All of these things are part of Heartprint’s daily petrol.
And then there is real petrol. The liquid stuff. The kind we need for our two tuk-tuks.
Our larger tuk-tuk carries our build team, tools, and supplies to our sites. Without it, we’d be unable to efficiently transport all we need to our build sites. The smaller one takes people to doctor or dentist appointments or to off-site classes and is used to run errands for the Community Centre. So petrol and oil and other maintenance such as tire repair or replacement are needed.
This is all on top of rent, electricity, water, and building maintenance.
Your Match-it-May contribution is the “gluestick” that enables us to hold the whole operation together—the petrol that keeps us moving. We rely on you. We need your annual donation to this fund, no matter how small. This is the chance to see your dollars grow multiple times through the matching programme.
We are here to answer any questions or tell you more about whiteboards and glue! But always to thank you for whatever you can do.
Love, your HP team