Today we met up with PHF to explain to them about our findings and reflections after the recce trip. Jacq and I opted to show the facts and photos of the home first and discuss about our thoughts afterwards.
Terence came with Deborah (co-founder of PHF). I felt like we were handing up a post-excursion report to our professors. After the presentation, Deborah and Terence asked us many questions which never occurred to us at first – child protection, fire safety and organizational support. They challenged us to delve even further and to find out what are the critical issues which we have overlooked or chose to ignore. Initially I had this mentality that we were unable to provide much help to our overseas partner due to our lack of knowledge. In response to that, Terence mentioned that everything has to be learnt along the way. PHF also started off not knowing anything. It is through the questions, reflections and realizations that they learnt about the fundamental issues of what were necessary to make the organizations sustainable. When I told them about my thoughts of YEP as merely a fundraising project, Terence asked. “What will happen to the home if there is no funding? Will the children go home?”
They also reiterated on the purpose of this trip. Why did we help LHCH out of the many organizations out there? Do we want a year’s worth of planning and effort to go down the drain simply by not giving our best?
After the meeting I felt a bit demoralized because it seemed like we merely answered the surface issues during the recce trip. Jacq and I had a discussion afterwards – we told ourselves that we need to reset our expectations (tangible and intangible). In what areas do we want to impact LHCH? What is our role when it comes to funding? As it is clear to us that this shall not be a one time project, we need to dig deeper and understand more. It will be good to start from the basics.
One good thing that came out of this meeting was that PHF has decided to be our endorser for this year (YEAH FINALLY). Inspiring India will become of the projects under PHF and we can do our own fundraising efforts through PHF online platform. This is definitely a good step towards making this project sustainable.
