Posted on

Goducate Project Leaders Training – Finally we meet and dream together!

Last week, Goducate project leaders from 6 Asian countries gathered in Singapore for the first Goducate Project Leaders Training. Most of these are men and women who lead teams of Goducate volunteers in the countries where they serve.

For some it was the first time to hold a passport and leave their country. These were dear men who had been so busy serving in their Goducate projects and have never had the opportunity to leave their country. For many it was their first time to get to meet other Goducate project leaders and Headquarters Coordinating staff.

But for all it was the first time that we could spend time learning from each other and be challenged by others to dream BIG! For most project leaders, it was often a struggle just to get enough funds to support themselves and their projects. Survival rather than expansion was the priority.

But we were reminded constantly throughout the training that we have to dream BIG because Asia has a big population and the majority are poor in need of help to help themselves. The project leaders who had dreamt big and expanded their ministries shared their stories and encouraged the others.

Many Goducate supporters and volunteers joined the project leaders for the training sessions.

Goducate is a non-profit organization that needs many more volunteers to help!
Please volunteer!

Posted on

10 tips on writing a blog by Dr Leslie Tay from IeatIshootIpost food blog

Blogs are like little news websites that have sprouted in the internet world very rapidly. It is really very easy to start a blog using free tools like blogspot and wordpress. Volunteers working in Asia to help poorer Asians face many challenges and difficulties. They may have interesting and exciting encounters to share with others. Many of them are still writing letters and postcards.

It is much easier to write their stories in the form of a blog. When we write our stories and post them online we can potentially reach a reader base of over 1.56 billion internet users. I cannot understand why there are still so many organizations which persisted in ‘cutting down more trees’ to print brochures and letters to update their donors.

Donors often give to charities blindly and they really do not know how the money is going to be spent. It will be very rewarding for the donors to be able to read the stories and encounters faced by the volunteers in the frontline. People who give to orphanages to sponsor orphans would be thrilled to be able to read and see photos of the orphans posted in a blog by volunteers.

We are very privileged to have Dr Leslie Tay who came to share with us during the Goducate seminar (19-01-2010) on his experience with blogging online. Dr Tay is a general practitioner who became famous in the online web community in Singapore because of his food blog, “IeatIshootIpost.sg. His food blog has a very high ranking on Alexa and wide base of online readers.

Dr Leslie Tay from IeatishootIpost at Goducate.org Seminar

(Dr Leslie Tay sharing passionately about his experience in blogging)

He shared with us the following tips on how to write a blog:

1. Keep it concise and easily scannable

2. Keep in mind who you are writing for. Example: The style for writing to target readers who are businessmen is different from the style to target children.

3. Write something unique and useful

4. Make it personal. Write as if you are talking to a friend.

5. Provide an attention grabbing photo to evoke an emotional response.

6. The first paragraph must make an impact.

7. Make your Headline POP!

8. Make people chuckle

9. Provide nuggets of information

10. Aim to create a response.

Goducate is a non profit organization with a mission to help poorer Asians help themselves. We are grateful to Dr Leslie Tay for spending his precious time with us during the Goducate seminar. If you are good in blogging or an expert in SEO, we really want to hear from you. We need all the help and advice we could get from people like Dr Leslie Tay or experience bloggers to help us to help these poorer Asians.

We need you to be a voice for the poor Asians!

Posted on

Haiti Earthquake – urgent help needed now and AFTER the earthquake

Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has been hit by its worst earthquake since 1770. Its capital, Port-au-Prince and its surroundings, where almost a quarter of Haiti’s population lives has been devastated.

Thankfully, many countries and relief organizations have mobilized their resources to help this battered country. The speed of telecommunications and transportation has made relief work so much more efficient and effective. I am thankful and amazed at the speed, organizational abilities, resources and skills of these relief teams. They seem to improve with each natural catastrophe. The speed with they reacted this time seems better than after the Sichuan (China) earthquake in 2008, which seemed better than they did after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

While the quality of emergency relief work is improving rapidly, the quality of the follow-up work does not seem to have improved much. In fact, in most such cases the vast majority of resources are used in the immediate relief work. After that, the poor country is usually forgotten – until the next major catastrophe.

The majority of Haiti’s population is illiterate. I am sure that far more Haitians have died from effects of poverty than from all its earthquakes. I am thankful for all the dear people who are doing their best to help Haiti in this hour of great need. But I hope that more people will also remember to help Haitians to achieve a better life after the horrors of this earthquake are over.

I’ve personally seen the effects of natural catastrophes in Asia – typhoons, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes. But all these pale in comparison to the on-going effect of poverty and hopelessness on millions of poor Asians.

Emergency relief work is needful.

But the less glamorous, on-going work of helping a poor child to learn to read and write is just as important – if not more important!