Building Futures in Malawi

We are a small UK based charity committed to improving opportunities for children in Malawi. Building Futures in Malawi began life in 1988 when Mark Broughton - Taylor met Malawian Pastor Booker Banda at a Baptist convention in Glasgow. Booker was planning to build a secondary school within his church compound in Lilongwe, Malawi. Mark was keen to help. He arranged a fundraising tour around Britain. Over the following years they raised enough money to build 6 classrooms and Falls secondary School was built.

 

 

Since then Building Futures in Malawi has built upon the success of this school and added a second school in the south of Lilongwe. Building Futures in Malawi have recently added a library at each of these schools and these libraries have been incredibly well received. The Library at Falls School receives 70,000 visits per year!

Malawi Development

We have found that projects like Falls Secondary School take a long time to develop. We invest a lot of time into everything that we do and we set firm foundations to ensure that the work we do is long lasting. We strive to ensure that the libraries, schools and sports coaching activities that we are involved with contribute toward development in Malawi. We try and tackle the issue of Malawi development in the following ways:

  1. We build school buildings.
  2. We run community sports coaching programmes that educate young Malawians about HIV/AIDS.
  3. We run a guest house for volunteers to visit and help our projects.
  4. We offer guidance to school committees and teachers to help Malawian schools run efficiently.
  5. We aim to link people in the UK that are interested in helping Africa with people in Malawi that need support. Help us!

 

Best Charity to Donate to

We strive to be the best charity to donate money to by ensuring that 100% of the money that you donate goes to our projects. We also ensure that we maximise the effectiveness of the money that you donate by investing the majority of the funds into sustainable projects. For example our schools are run by Malawians and they are self funding.

  

 

This means that we only spend money on the buildings. This means that you can see exactly where your money goes and more importantly it means that they are not dependent on money from us to survive. In fact we have not given a single penny to Falls School for seven years and it continues to run extremely effectively!

"To look is one thing. To see what you look at another. To understand what you see is a third. To learn from what you understand is something else. But to act on what you learn is all that really matters!'

- Benjamin Puckett

 

The Building Futures in Malawi Team

It is also important to mention that we have no paid staff in the UK. Instead we have a dedicated team of people that offer their expertise for free. Let me introduce you:

 

  Chairman - Mark Broughton Taylor

 Trustee - Des Bowden

 Project Manager - Tom Bowden

 Sandy Broughton - Taylor

 

 
Additional Trustees:

Committee Members:

 


TV Gives Charity Donations A Boost

Friday 26th February 2010

The science of marketing psychology isn't just reserved for the consumer masses, it can be used to help maximise donations to charities and not for profit organisations. A recent study carried out by the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) found that different types of media coverage can have a profound effect on the amount of money donated by the public. Following the Haiti disaster, the foundation found that newspaper coverage of the event was not as effective in encouraging members of the public to donate to the appeal. Advertisements and stories influenced only 6 per cent of those who gave money. This is in stark contrast to 11 per cent of the public who donated to the DEC Asia-Pacific appeal just a year earlier. The shift in trend could be seen as alarming by fundraisers, but in fact it is our use of technology that is affecting the way we empathise with a cause, and our likeliness to donate to an appeal. Television coverage accounted for as much as 75 per cent of donations received for the Haiti Disaster Appeal, a figure that has risen since the Asia-Pacific appeal in 2009, where the figure was less than 70 per cent. It is evident that fundraisers need to maximise the potential of modern technology, and use social media portals to tap into altruistic tendencies. Television may be top of the donation leader board now, but surely it is just a matter of time before social networking sites such as FaceBook and Twitter play just as an important role in raising much needed funds for appeals.

 
 

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