To view the Offerings video please click here https://vimeo.com/m/73007485
TECH ISSUES: If you are experiencing technical issues in accessing this page and making a pledge, please contact Brendan Rigby at - [email protected]
______________________
The funding raised through StartSomeGood will be used directly to pay for the printing and shipping costs of this beautiful book.
We need YOU, our supporters to buy a book (or two) to help us reach our ‘tipping point’ .Once we reach our ‘tipping point’ the printing costs will be covered and all profits will then go directly to the Sdey Leur schools project.
How do I buy a book?
1. Please choose your “level of support” ie where you would like your book to be posted to and click to make a book purchase. You will need a Paypal account to finalise your payment.
2. We will contact you later on through email to confirm your mailing address details so that we can ship the book to you in November 2013.
3. If you want to order more than one book, please order one at a time. We know this is time consuming but it’s to do with the ‘rewards’ structure.
4. Please buy your book now. You will see from the campaign page that we have a ‘count down’ so we only have a certain amount of days to raise funds. Basically the sooner
you buy a book the better it is for the campaign and the quicker we can provide support to the children in the Sdey Leur community of schools.
For more information about this project read through the campaign below and watch our video.
__________________
"Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development" - Kofi Annan
Our Goal:
In January 2014, eight volunteers from the Sdey Leur Project Team will wrap up months of fundraising with a trip to Cambodia to participate in a project that will positively impact over 500 school kids across 3 schools in the Ek
Phnom district of Battambang province. The money raised by the team will help finance school infrastructure projects such as toilets and wash stations, provide teacher training and offer support with community initiatives over a 3 year period.
The project team needs to raise $92,000 to fund this long term project, and so in addition to the personal fundraising efforts of the 8 committed volunteers, the idea for a contemporary cookbook was put forward within the team
as a way to raise funds, showcase this beautiful cuisine and raise awareness about this beautiful country.
Why our Project is important:
“Faced with extreme poverty, up to half of Cambodia’s children do not complete primary school”
Cambodia is a tiny country sandwiched between Thailand to the West, Laos to the North, Vietnam to the East and the Gulf of Thailand to the south. Although the Kingdom of Cambodia is rich in natural resources, decades of war and internal conflict have left it one of the world's poorest countries with considerable social and economic scars. Ravaged by genocide, repression and starvation Cambodia continues to struggle to meet its population’s most basic needs.
Children in Cambodia are also viewed as an economic resource, allowing parents to look for work and food or supplementing family income, however meagre a contribution that may be. For example, at harvest time a day’s labour is worth $1.50. So, in a world where a family survives on $2 per day, prolonging an education at a low level seems irrelevant when the priority is the next meal.
The school dropout rates are highest in rural areas, where 80% of Cambodians live. Girls are often the first to drop out, yet one more year of schooling can provide the opportunity to significantly increase a girl’s future earnings.
How our project will make a difference to the Sdey Leur cluster of schools:
Supporting a cluster of schools over a period of three years means the entire community benefits. This kind of long term support is necessary to ensure that the changes made are sustainable and able to be integrated into the schooling system – leading to long-lasting improvement to education in Cambodia.
Included within the Sdey Leur project are a range of infrastructure, teacher training and community support initiatives. The Sdey Leur school is the core school with approximately 264 children. The satellite schools of Prek Luoung and Sdey Krom have 137 and 120 kids respectively. All three schools have inadequate toilet and sanitation facilities and non-existent playground areas. These open areas regularly flood during the monsoonal season due to poor drainage and no hard surface areas. In addition, several of the buildings are structurally inadequate and at risk of collapse. The volunteers will participate in manual work during their trip to help build wash stations in the school and tiling and painting in the new and upgraded toilet facilities. The volunteers will also have the opportunity to interact with the children through the Health Program.
A lack of clean water and poor sanitation are major problems in Cambodia. Diarrhoea is a leading cause of infant and child mortality accounting for 45% of all fatalities among children less than a month old. In addition, chronic diarrhoea exacerbates malnutrition and impairs the immune system’s ability to fight off infection and disease. Teaching the kids the importance of washing their hands, together with how to brush their teeth and taking their height and weight measurements helps to track their development over the long term. The group will also work at the Prek Luoung school, building a handball court and kicking off the Sports Program with the kids which aims to improve motivation and engagement and provides a source of encouragement to attend school as well as develop gross motor skills.
The Volunteer team has partnered with SeeBeyondBorders to deliver this project. SeeBeyondBorders is an Australian development organisation which provides Cambodian children with access to quality teaching and learning at school. Faced with extreme poverty, nearly half the children living outside the main cities do not complete primary school. They work to enable more children to complete their basic education and progress from primary to lower secondary school, by improving the quality of education and access to education.
The SeeBeyondBorders programs have been developed out of recognition that the challenges facing Cambodia’s education system are multi-dimensional and therefore, solutions will require a holistic approach. Employing continuous learning, assessment and development, they deliver three integrated programs:
Teach the Teacher - provides training for Cambodian teachers by way of workshops delivered by volunteer Australian teachers; mentoring which provides continuous in-class support from Cambodian peer leaders who are trained by our local SeeBeyondBorders team and uses relevant teaching resources.
Better Schools - improves teaching and learning environments at school through redeveloping dilapidated school infrastructure and facilities.
Getting to School - assists families and communities to educate their children through practical initiatives and community support and increases commitment and school attendance.
SeeBeyondBorders’ development philosophy advocates that all children should have the opportunity to achieve at school and that school should be where children are empowered to improve their own lives. All of our programs support the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goal Number Two, “Achieve universal primary education”, and are designed around UNICEF’s Child Friendly Schools framework, as adopted and adapted by the Royal Government of Cambodia’s Ministry of Education Youth and Sport. They are committed to sustainably improving education standards in Cambodia and promote local participation, management, responsibility and ownership across all of their programs.
SeeBeyondBorders is a registered charity in Australia and the United Kingdom, and operates as a registered international non-government organisation in Cambodia, with no religious or political affiliations. They are signatory members of ACFID (Australian Council for International Development) and are committed to full adherence to the principles and obligations of the Code-of-Conduct, and to meet what they see as our responsibility, as privileged people, to those in need.
About the book:
The idea for a Cambodian cookbook was put forward by the team as a major fundraising initiative due, in part to the skillset of the group. Tamsin is a freelance Editor, Alex is a Food Stylist, Markus is a Photographer and with Claire as Project Leader, this combined skillset gave the group a solid foundation from which to produce the book. There were very few contemporary Cambodian cookbooks on the market and it was therefore felt that it was an ideal opportunity both to showcase this little known cuisine and to share some images of this mesmerising country. We wanted to create a book that Cambodian people would be proud of and a book that would perhaps encourage people to visit and explore this beautiful country and at the same time raise awareness of the challenges facing Cambodia.
In addition to the cookbook team, there are a further 6 volunteers who are personally fundraising $3,500 each in order to meet the requirements to be part of the project team that will travel to Cambodia in January 2014 to work on various school infrastructure projects.
