Micro-NGO Vision
Micro Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) Vision
The starting point – Family to Family.
At present foreign national family members living in this country send more money ‘home’ to their families in the developing world than all the Government and large charities put together. Together they exist as the biggest charitable endeavour in the country. Our vision is – to encourage the trustworthy family member here to engage with their friends and work colleagues to send aid to the poor using one or two of their trusted family members in the ‘homeland’ as distribution agents. See the ‘How to’ page for details of how this works in practice.
Oldham is our hometown and the base from which we work. It has large numbers of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi people and our ultimate ambition would be for Oldham itself to adopt an area in each of these homelands as well as on the continent of Africa, and bring help at an institutional level as well as Family to Family.
The basic building block for our charitable work is the ‘Personal Project’. This is a one off gift to an individual or a family to meet a specific need, usually financial, educational or medical. Click here for examples.
The outworking of this vision would be to bring together around the trusted family members, all Oldham’s community groups, Churches, Mosques, Temples, Schools, Businesses, Pubs, Clubs, Council Departments, Service providers, etc to take responsibility for charitable projects in aid of the poorest in the various homelands. By focusing on a limited number of areas we will be able to make a real and immediate difference.
Whilst not forgetting our responsibility to our own underprivileged, we, the people of Oldham, would commit ourselves to the long term development of our chosen areas. The objectives for each child in those areas would include:-
Being able to go to school
Having clean water to drink
Having access to good sanitation
Having access to health care
Having a roof over his/her head
Having parents who have employment to support him
These needs can all be met on the Family to Family basis and larger projects should be ‘partnered’ with the homeland councils.
Our assistance would be through personal involvement with thousands of ‘stand alone’ projects. Each person or group would know what they were supporting and be able to see it through to its completion before starting a second and then a third project.
The projects would be organised in the following ways:-
Family to family
School to school
Business man to business man
Organisations for larger projects
Council to Council for major projects
We should not be daunted by the scale of the task, as only a little of what we have here will go a very long way over there and make such a great difference.
With good internet communication, right down to village school level, we can get to know personally the people who our ‘projects’ are designed to help.
Our young people could be encouraged to take time out to go and work on some of the projects. Families could take their holidays there and meet the folk and see first hand what is happening. We could bring families over to stay with us for holidays too.
For the wider benefit of all Oldhamers and key to this vision’s success will be the involvement of Oldham’s Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. Their inside knowledge would be needed to ease and speed things along. We would want them to continue the various projects that they already have with their own peoples. However, we see that it is vital for the success of this wider project that they work with each other and us, not only to facilitate aid to their own people, but also to sponsor projects in each other’s homeland communities.
We should let nothing prevent us, as the people of Oldham in the twenty-first century, from bringing this much needed assistance to some of the poorer peoples of the world. By these means Oldham can be found to be a town worthy of a good name presenting a model for others to follow to the very great benefit of many in need in our world.
Who knows? where Oldham leads others may follow!