ChristmasFuture Foundation

The ChristmasFuture Foundation, founded in Calgary, Canada, in 2006, is a non-religious, registered Canadian charity that helps people support the eradication of extreme poverty through online giving to development projects. The organization's stated goal is to enable and encourage individuals to refocus their Christmas spending towards funding strategic and sustainable initiatives in villages of the developing world.

ChristmasFuture focuses on the eradication of extreme poverty, working toward the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. ChristmasFuture launched to North America in November 2007, and raised $92,000 towards projects that will impact over 38,000 lives in 10 countries. Approximately 2,000 people in North America experienced a new way to give with ChristmaFuture.

History

Jay Baydala came up with the idea of ChristmasFuture in 2005, and worked with Glen Mackey, David Yarema and Lynette Stephenson to refine the core components of the organization. ChristmasFuture Foundation was incorporated in June 2006.

ChristmasFuture launched a pilot project at the Calgary Science School during the 2006 holiday season. During this time, the ChristmasFuture team created a week-long humanities curriculum focused on global citizenship, extreme poverty, and NGO’s for grades 4 to 9. Throughout the last week of November 2006 the entire school (600 students) learned the curriculum; many of the students returned home and asked their parents to redirect the amount spent on a single gift towards the selected project in Sauri, Kenya. The teachers also played a part by asking the students who intended to purchase a holiday gift for their teacher to refocus that spending towards the same project in Sauri, Kenya. This single pilot project raised over $10 000 CDN for the building of a school library as part of the Millennium Village Project. The final assessment of the community occurred in April and construction was set to begin shortly after, the team estimated it would take 5 months to complete with a slow construction schedule in June and July as the community would be involved in harvest activities. Construction has been even slower than expected.

Organizational Structure

A board of directors, currently chaired by Roy Moore, oversees the ChristmasFuture Foundation. The board consists of Roy Moore, Adam Hedayat, Glen Mackey, Gena Rotstein, David Yarema, Evan Hu, Lorne Jaques, Peter Jamieson, Ryan McDonald, and Jay Baydala.

Approach

ChristmasFuture highlights that in North America, over $1 trillion USD is spent during the holiday season, and uses this fact as a focal point for the power of donating some of this spending towards development. The organization believes in a need for transparency and seeing evidence of the results of development projects.

Funding

The organization intends that all donor funding will go directly to the projects donors choose, commencing with Christmas 2007 launch.

ChristmasFuture's operational funding comes from private sources, including individuals, corporations, and foundations. ChristmasFuture intends to fund their operations entirely by interest revenues by year 7.

Activities

* ChristmasFuture has completed a pilot project at the Calgary Science School to raise funds for a new library as part of the Millennium Villages Project Sauri Cluster in the Kenya highlands west of the Rift Valley. Over 600 students, teachers, and parents were involved a week-long education program about extreme poverty, which was follow by a fundraising program for the 2006 Christmas season.
* DonorTrust - an open source project initiated under GPL on RubyForge. [ [http://rubyforge.org/projects/donortrust/ DonorTrust RubyForge project page.] ] DonorTrust is a piece of software that empowers a model of lower overheads, greater transparency, and proof-of-impact feedback for the donor. In 2008, DonorTrust is participating in the Google Summer of Code program. [ [http://code.google.com/soc/2008/christmas/about.html ChristmasFuture Summer of Code page.] ]

ee also

* Millennium Development Goals
* The Earth Institute
* Millennium Promise

References

External links

* [http://www.christmasfuture.org ChristmasFuture site]
* [http://www.christmasfuture.org/about-us/faqs/ FAQs]