Dr Leslie Tay, the founder of one of Singapore’s most popular food blog ieatishootipost.sg, is a good friend and supporter of Goducate.
He visited our literacy centers in Sabah earlier this year and has since been a firm supporter of that work.
He has organized a fund-raising dinner this Friday, featuring a favorite chef called Gen Shu, who has offered to donate a part of the dinner ($10 per diner) to Goducate.
When our corporate sponsor, MHC Asia, heard about this, they offered to match every dollar raised with another dollar in donations!
We are hoping to raise enough to purchase a vehicle for our literacy centers in Sabah!
Our corporate sponsor MHC Asia has donated funds for another vehicle for the Goducate model-farm in Laguna, Philippines. This is the fifth vehicle that MHC has donated to Goducate since last year. They first donated a vehicle for Goducate Batam when they heard that several of our Goducate workers nearly loss their lives when their old broken-down van flipped over in a remote part of Batam island.
Since then they have donated a van for our Sabah literacy centers and two vans for our Cambodian children’s home. MHC Asia has also provided free space for the Goducate Singapore office and other supporting services for that office. They have indeed been a real source of financial support and encouragement to us.
This vehicle will help our Goducate workers to transport materials to and from our model-farm to our Goducate learning centers in Laguna and to the market-place. This vehicle will help Goducate Laguna work to be more efficient in producing organic fertilizer (from earth-worms) and producing vegetables for food for our staff and for sale.
Our aim is to help the Goducate work in Laguna to be more self-supporting. The vehicle will also be used to transport many poor people in the Laguna area to the farm to learn scientific ways to produce food for their families and for sale. It is our aim to help them to help themselves.
Leo, who supervises Goducate Laguna is now looking for the right vehicle to buy with the funds sent from MHC Asia. As of now, it looks like it could be one of the two second-hand vehicles below.
MHC Management staff handing over the two vans to the Goducate Children's Home in Cambodia
The Goducate Coordinating Center is situated in the research hub of Singapore. Among its “neighbours” are the National University of Singapore (Singapore’s premier university), and Biopolis and Fusionopolis (which are two centers that house Singapore’s cutting-edge research organizations).
Goducate has been fortunate to get the use of this office space, through the kind generosity of one of our major corporate sponsors, a cutting-edge health-care group called MHC Asia Group Pte Ltd. MHC has not only provided this valuable space to us but also been a very generous donor to several of Goducate projects in Sabah (East Malaysia), Cambodia and Indonesia.
MHC staff teaching children at the Goducate Learning Center in Batam Indonesia
Several of their board members and staff have even visited our projects on the field. Earlier this year a MHC team was sent to Indonesia to teach English and provide basic medical screening. As Goducate lacks many of the IT and other high-tech skills needed to reach the world, we have been fortunate to have the support of specialists from MHC. MHC is indeed a model corporate sponsor that not only provides much needed funds for Goducate but also encourages its staff to be involved in charity work.
Our center has been designed with the purpose of being a command-center where we daily meet to dream, plan and execute our battle against poverty and hopelessness. The many photos of poor people surrounding us as we meet are a constant challenge to us of the importance and urgency of our work. And the many smiling faces in the photos that surround us are a constant encouragement to us as we face what seem like insurmountable difficulties.
I believe the same impact will be felt by all those that visit our center. Therefore, I believe that it is an ideal place to invite our friends to meet at the Goducate center. So if you have to meet someone in the neighbourhood (say, the National University of Singapore, Biopolis or Fusionopolis), then make the Goducate Center your meeting place! You may turn your meeting from one that is social or mundane into one that is life-changing!
