Goducate believes in helping needy Asians help themselves. Therefore, it believes in starting projects that are eventually self-sustaining. The exception to this is when Goducate helps out in emergency situations (eg, earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, floods).
Therefore, Goducate Training Center, where future Goducate workers are trained, must set the example of being self-sustaining. This will be a big challenge because it costs a lot of money to maintain an 11 hectare site, with multiple facilities on it. Furthermore, there is the need to feed, house, and train many trainees (hopefully 100 full-time trainees by 2012). We also need to feed about 100 teenagers from poor surrounding villages each weekend who come to the training center for weekend training in lifeskills such as discipline, teamwork, leadership, cultivating good habits, etc. Then there is the need to pay our faculty of agricultural lecturers and trainers, and teachers in English, literacy, computer skills, foreign language, and cross-cultural knowledge.
One way to help is to produce as much of our own food as possible. We have managed to grow high-yield rice that provides all our present rice needs. Our own vegetable gardens and fruit trees can produce most of our vegetable and fruit needs, with some extra for sale. Our impounding pond has an estimated 15,000 tilapia fish—which can provide most of our needs for animal protein.
However, we still need to raise funds to pay for the other expenses mentioned in para 2. We believe that we can raise this by renting out our facilities to corporations, institutions, schools, and even individuals for their special events. For example, a corporation may rent our multipurpose hall and facilities for their training or bonding event, or a university may rent our huts, dipping pools, and activity fields for a special event,
It is much more convenient to rely on donations to maintain the training center, but if we can’t help ourselves, we will not be able to train our workers to help others to help themselves.
