It’s REPORT CARD time.

It’s almost the end of financial year and time to look at what has happened in the Birds Nest project over the last 12 months.

Foxglove Project has loved the opportunity to invest into the women and families of Chennai in southern India. Families of mothers or parents living on the pavement for more than 35 years. It is difficult to imagine.

And the plan is to advocate for identity papers, gain access for children to government healthcare and education, provide vocational and entrepreneur training, and offer support to gain slum accommodation and a permanent address. Then, the women can join a Self Help Group and start a micro business. Life changes for everyone.

It’s early days in the Foxglove plan but in the last year we have made small steps forward.  We have directly and indirectly supported 160 women and family members taking their first steps towards independence and self-determination whilst living on the pavement.

• 30 women completed hospitality training
• 3 high school scholarships holders ranked in top 5% in Tamil Nadu
• 8 youths completed plumbing & electrical qualification after dropping out of high school
• 14 students enrolled into local Government schools
• 7 students gained college entrance after completing high school.

Read the BIRDS NEST IMPACT REPORT 2017 to learn more about what has happened in this project.

Hope is rising. Let’s see where it can lead.

It’s REPORT CARD time.

We’re coming up to the end of financial year when we invite people to make a tax-deductible donation to the Foxglove Project.

But before we do that, let’s tell you what has happened in 2017/18 in the Grassroots Rwanda Project.

Grassroots Rwanda focuses on starting women’s Self Help Groups. And our goal is to start 1000 SHGs for 20,000 women in one of the poorest districts in Rwanda.

This year we have supported 2920 women into 146 new Self Help Groups.

Each woman joins for life. The women become family to one another. And they start businesses, tiny businesses, that enable them to provide for their own household.

They become independent, self-sustaining self-determining women entrepreneurs.

From poverty to freedom and with friendship at the heart of the groups.

So read our GRASSROOTS RWANDA IMPACT REPORT 2017 to discover what has happened. And then join us by making a tax-deductible donation.  It costs $30 to fund one woman into a self help group life.

Offer your resources, your influence and your heart to a project that is changing women and their communities forever.

Foxglove’s first book, Twenty Reasons to Believe, is available now. It’s a book about the impact of the Self Help Group approach for the poorest women in Rwanda and telling the stories of twenty women. Twenty stories. Twenty reasons to believe. For $20 plus postage, you’ll receive a beautiful, full colour, hardcover book that will inspire, inform and impassion about what is possible in the Developing World.

Few of us have the courage or self-belief to think we can make a difference.  

But you can. You truly can. 

In a world, vast in population and resources, we find dimensions of inequity that take our breath away. And too often, these discoveries make us retreat. Make us step back, look inwards and settle for making our own way. What can I do? 

But the world is also filled with men and women who do not choose this path. Countless people. People whose names we will never know. But whose choices we understand. The choice to live expansive outward-looking lives. Doing whatever they can, wherever they are.  

And I want to join that team. That movement. Foxglove is all about the everyday person stepping forward and saying,  

“I want to stand up; to injustice and inequity. And to stand for; empowerment and self-sufficiency.” 

Can you imagine the impact of 1000, 5000, 100,000 people giving, educating and advocating in their everyday lives for women across the world? 

I see it. And I can see it is not small.  

And in return, I can see we get to live the kind of lives we imagine are out of reach when they are just around the corner. 

Yet the first steps are tiny. They may not look like much. They may look like hosting a house party, organising a free dress day, volunteering to help on a stall or simply sharing an article on social media.  But they are a point of contact for our soul that tells us we have bought in. We are going to be part of changing the world.  

And when we set out on this path, nothing can hold us back.

♥️

Kelley