Through GlobalEyes

American High School's Annual Turkey Trot in support of Children Rescue Mission, Kenya and anti-malaria activities in the communities we work with in Kisumu will be Friday November 9th. Many thanks to the students of American High School and board member Jessica Chacon for organizing this wonderful event!

Just a quick post to update on some of the things happening at GlobalEyes and with our partner, Tropical Focus in Kenya:

− Children Rescue Mission, Kenya (CRM) is planning to take on four additional children; future fundraising and micro-goals will consider these additions.

− Tropical Focus has identified a widow with six children in a neighboring community that is in need of extra support. One of her children has been taken in at CRM but she and her remaining children could use extra help, especially food and domestic supplies. Please contact me at vensign@throughglobaleyes.org for more information about Pamela Ateino of Kajwang Village and her children.

− GlobalEyes, with the assistance of Tropical Focus, will be partnering to help another primary school in the Kisumu Region – Dago Thim. We will be constructing new latrines for the campus as well as initiating an outreach feeding program, similar to the program at Obede primary school.

− A newsletter will be distributed soon in which these items will be discussed in detail

Yesterday evening we launched our new GlobalEyes website that we've been working on for a while now. We've changed the design a bit and added a lot of information on ourselves and our projects and partners.

The big change is the launch of our "Bare Naked Org" project - making our organization as transparent as possible. To that end, we have completely revamped the blog, importing nearly every email that has crossed our inboxes relating to GlobalEyes in the past year - I believe it is over a hundred of them. Through these, you can read the story of how this organization was conceived and created, how it grew and turned into what it is today. We will continue to post our correspondence with Tropical Focus, our partner in Kenya, going forward. If you would like to basically be copied on every email that goes back and forth, you can simply subscribe to our RSS feed in your feed reader (like Google Reader or Bloglines).

In addition to that, we've also started to incorporate the idea of micro-fundraising - instead of asking for general donations to help support our projects, we have broken them down into small goals of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each and will raise money towards them one at a time. When the money is transferred and spent in Kenya, we will be able to get photos and video of what it was spent on so that everybody that contributed to a micro-goal can see where the money went. We feel this continues our goal of transparency.

I hope you enjoy the new site and find the correspondence interesting. Please leave comments if you have any feedback or ideas.

At GlobalEyes, we're trying something new. We're trying to become a radically transparent organization. This means we're putting everything we can think of online for you. Not only where we're raising money and how it's being spent, but conversations we have internally, board meeting podcasts - anything we can think of.

We thought it would be interesting to open up the processes and goings on - so people that are so inclined could see what it takes, what we're doing and how it is done. We want to provide a window into those processes for anyone interested in how a small non-profit communicates and collaborates with it's African NGO counterparts, how it raises and distributes funds, and how it comes to decisions about what to do and how to manage things.

We want to provide a model of transparency and an ongoing case study for everyone who wants to see behind the curtain of a non-profit in America. We would like you to join with us in giving feedback and possibly helping with funding to hopefully make the world a little better.

The idea is to move towards a model where you are as much a part of the organization as we are. You have access to the same information and can take part in what we are doing more fully. We're hoping this makes you feel involved and will help us in what we're trying to do.

This was partially inspired by the transparency displayed over at the Bare Naked App.

More to come as we get it finished up.

We're trying to raise $512 to purchase a water tank for the Childrens Rescue Mission, Kenya orphanage.

The GlobalEyes website has just gone live and we are getting ready to fill out all the information about our new organization. We have a blog, so we can keep everyone up to date on news and events and will soon be putting ways to donate and contact us online. We are also working to get as much information as possible about our current initiatives online, so you can see what we're up to.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to send them to us.

Thanks!