Our Wish for a Wonderful New Year
Jim Craig, Board President, behind the counter at the Holiday Bazaar
I am excited to begin my first year as President of Mitrata’s Board. I’ve been involved with Mitrata since 2008, first as a donor, then child sponsor, and then also as a board member, and I’ve served for the past 8 years as Board Secretary. Being a child sponsor, however, is what I consider to be my most important role. I began sponsoring Sushmita when she was in 4th grade, and this year she will graduate from university. It’s been a joy to see her develop into a confident and successful young woman, and I feel blessed to have been able to help her reach her goals. Eight years ago, I travelled to Nepal and met Sushmita. I hope every child sponsor will have the opportunity to visit Nepal and meet their child; it was an amazing moment that I will cherish forever. As President I will be making regular trips to Nepal to coordinate with BSF, our NGO partner in Nepal, and I’ll be seeing Sushmita again this upcoming March.
Sushmita holding gifts and letters from Jim
Myself, Christine, and all of the Mitrata Board members and staff have been hard at work creating, revising, and implementing our five-year strategic plan through 2024. This year, 2020, is the first of those five years. We are looking forward to a productive year as we improve to better serve our children in Nepal and expand our programs to be able to serve more underprivileged children in the Kathmandu area.
To that end, we have several main goals for 2020. One of these is to develop and strengthen our board. This year, we are focusing on developing our advisory board and developing a Young Professionals Board. Our advisory board is already a powerful resource, and as we seek to diversify our Board’s skills and expertise, advisory members can serve an even more important role. Mitrata’s Young Professionals Board will be a way for post-graduate professionals without previous experience on a board to get involved with Mitrata, coordinate their own events, and offer us their unique expertise.
We are going to welcome new child sponsors this year and establish a greater presence in explaining sponsorship. Last year, we exceeded our sponsorship goals, and this year we will work to reduce the financial gap for under-sponsored children by welcoming new sponsors to meet the remainder of their needs. We often get many questions about the impact of sponsorship for both the child and sponsor, and many of our current supporters have amazing stories to tell about these sponsor-child relationships as they have experienced them. This is why, starting this year, we will be releasing several sponsor story videos of sponsors and their children talking candidly about their experiences. We hope that these videos will exemplify how gratifying and remarkable being a sponsor can be. We also hope that it helps new sponsors understand their role in their child’s life. These relationships can last a lifetime – even well after the child leaves our programs and enters into higher education or their working lives! Mitrata is unique in fostering as much communication as we do between sponsors and their children by hand-carrying letters and pictures to Nepal twice per year.
Another one of our goals is to expand the ways that people can give to Mitrata and get involved. We are so excited to be offering two events in Seattle this year for the first time ever! Our Climb for Himalaya Children on Mt. Baker will take place on July 10 and 11, and Seattle board members and child sponsors will also be hosting their own Trivia Night on October 17! Our St. Louis Trivia Night will take place on April 18 with the Holiday Bazaar in the first week of December, the 5 and 6. We are also expanding our planned giving program as an effort to secure our future sustainability and legacy. Implementing a new database this year will be a huge undertaking but will help greatly will both of these projects and many more.
Contact Center kids with sponsors and staff
Our Contact Center will also be a principal project. In the spring, we will transition our Contact Center graduates to two new school and will match them with new sponsors. We will be taking full advantage of the wonderful data collection system for the Contact Center set up by our volunteers, Taylor and Lauren. We know from seeing our kids grow and succeed in jobs and higher education that our programs are successful, but these data are vital to understanding how we can make the biggest impact and for lending to our credibility as an education-focused nonprofit. As phase two of our Contact Center expansion, we will be researching and identifying a new location in Kathmandu for our existing Contact Center. This move is integral to our three-tier expansion of the Center and will provide our children and staff with a much-needed increase in space, especially as we add more ways to support our children like with our after-school program. Our Contact Center is our early education program that increases our kids’ school-readiness as well as their health and wellbeing through multiple nutritious meals, a stable, secure school environment, and through counseling services. Investing in our Contact Center allows us to better serve these underprivileged children and better establish our uniquely successful program in Nepal. The Contact Center children are Mitrata’s future and our legacy.
Jim presenting Mitrata’s strategic plan
In the end, achieving Mitrata’s five-year strategic plan means doubling the size of both Mitrata’s operations in the U.S. and in Nepal in order to add more services for each one of our children. Implementing the strategic plan will be very challenging and will require hard work from our staff, board, and NGO partner, BSF. It will also require the continued support of our amazing donors and sponsors. However, fulfilling Mitrata’s mission and holding true to our values of helping our children flourish and reach their unique potential, like my sponsored child Sushmita has with her university graduation, makes all the hard work worthwhile.
— Jim Craig, Board President and child sponsor
Jim’s sponsored child, Sushmita