 Could you support us?
The Ideas Partnership depends entirely on donations, from individuals and organizations. We have very few paid staff (they're the ones who keep us ticking over and legal), and a very small administrative overhead. When we say that donations are going directly and completely to real impacts in our activities - maybe the one healthy snack that a child will get in a day, or transporting someone with special needs to get much-needed physiotherapy - it's true.
Over the years, much of our funding has come from personal donations - by friends, or family, or other individuals who like something that we're doing and have a couple of euros or pounds or dollars to spare.
1 euro buys a drink and a healthy snack for two children doing our Saturday actitvities.
10 euros takes a woman or child for a medical check-up.
25 pays for adult literacy and homework classes for a week. (So 1 international Kosovo 'per diem' covers a month of this important remedial learning.)
Really, every donation makes a difference in the life of someone who needs a difference. In case they help, we've suggested some guidelines for donations.
And here's another handy way to help: if you're coming to Kosovo you could stay at the Hotel Gracanica and at the same time give us some practical benefit through
Increasingly we have been successfully completing projects funded by...
institutional donations
- from international aid organizations, national development bodies, and charitable foundations. Our ground-level approach and low administrative costs mean that these organizations see meaningful and sustainable returns even from relatively small grants. Our compactness makes us an efficient partner in fulfilling project management and reporting requirements, and makes us flexible and responsive people to work with.
We always want to improve how we work with partners, and we conducted a donor survey of those institutions with whom we had completed projects. We asked a series of questions about TIP's quality as a responsible project partner; in every area, our average rating from donors was between '3 - mostly satisfactory' and the maximum '4 - fully satisfactory'. We received very strong average ratings (3.8 or 4) for communication and engagement with donors, for meeting reporting requirements, for fulfilling the contract, and for trustworthiness.
In their narrative comments, institutional donors focused on the clear focus of our projects, our strong relationships in the communities with whom we work, our energetic profile, our high motivation, and our volunteer ethos. There was real enthusiasm among donors about potentially working with TIP again, and indeed we have benefited from repeat grants from the majority of our donors.
A relatively small grant can guarantee a substantial part of TIP's basic operation. At the same time we're proving ourselves as a reliable and effective partner with whom to agree a project and see it implemented. We'd like to tell you more about how we work, and how we can work with you; so please feel free to get in touch via theideaspartnership@gmail.com.
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