Multiply your money | Invest in ColaLife (or book a holiday & help that way too)

You may have noticed that we are on a fundraising drive. But before I tell you why we are doing this, let me tell you how we have multiplied the money we have received from individual supporters so far.

To date we have received about £10,000 in donations, to put together the partnership and develop the plan to run a trial in Zambia. We’ve supplemented this with voluntary effort and help in kind – watch out for a further blog on that.  So far, in cash, we have raised £217,000 towards the cost of the trial. That’s a multiplier of 21.7 on donations from supporters.  So, for every £1 donated by individuals, we’ve raised £21.70 from major donors. But it gets better than that. We are now very confident that we will be able to raise the remaining £623,000 we need for the trial. And that will give a final multiplier of 84.  That’s equivalent to an interest rate of 8,400%. This offer is not available on the High Street!

So, if we’re confident of securing the funding for the trial, why are we still fund-raising? Jane and I have now moved out of our house in Rugby as the first step towards moving to Zambia to oversee the trial. This will engage us full-time for the first six months or so but then most of the tasks will fall to our local partners and we will drop to about half-time. At this point we will be using our ‘spare’ time to follow-up interest in other countries – Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa – to see if we can get things happening in those countries. The money we raise now will allow us to travel to these other countries to work with the local partners there and get plans in place for initiatives that suit local conditions.  These initiatives might mimic the Zambian plan, or might look at alternative models – and we will seek funding from major donors for those as plans develop.

So, if you are able to give there are several options:

• You can sponsor one of our cyclists who set off on Thursday (8/11) for a 400km ride from Dinard to Deauville in 4 days – 100% of your donation comes straight to ColaLife – Bill and Nigel are covering all of their costs of doing this
• You can give directly to ColaLife through a regular donation
• You can also give offline – the details of how to do this are here
• And finally, 20% of room sales at The Chic Collection are coming to us through their ‘ColaLife Promotion‘. Book a room, get 40% off and help out ColaLife at the same time

Thanks for your support.