Ahlanwasahlan 🤍
How are you doing?
Thank you all for your support this far. Ever since we had to renew our license to operate in the UAE I have had to think again and again of your support and investment in what we do. While this might read as a start to a goodbye letter, it is not. Not yet.
We are now registered with Masdar City in Abu Dhabi because we didn’t feel valued by Sharjah Media City. It cost us AED 19,605.43 in total to be registered. The most basic mandatory health insurance to work in Abu Dhabi cost AED 2,945.43. In comparison we only made AED 2,705 in community membership and activity fees last year.
I do not pay myself a salary and our financials will be posted. We have managed to finance our licensing and paid outreach public service announcements through our corporate activities; every dirham has been re-invested to keep us going. My family gifted me the new phone, which I use to take videos, when the old phone would no longer record sound, and I live in our family home so I do not have to pay rent or utilities. I am blessed and thankful that doing what I do is an option.
I want to stress the fact that I do not have to be in the UAE, so every time I feel weighed down with the responsibility I need to be reminded of why I took this work up in the first place. Coming back to this video helped remind me:
I am doing a lot of work now by myself, understandably because I needed to get it done in the way I envisioned it. But, I cannot keep doing what I do until we generate the funding we need to grow and employ a paid team. We need your active participation in more than the community cleanups.
An NGO, according to Investopedia “is a non-profit group that functions independently of any government. NGOs, sometimes called civil societies, are organized on community, national and international levels to serve a social or political goal such as humanitarian causes or the environment. Funding sources include membership dues, the sale of goods and services, private sector for-profit companies, philanthropic foundations, grants from local, state and federal agencies, and private donations. Individual private donors comprise a significant portion of NGO funding.”
I am happy that we were able to bring “ahlanwasahlan” into existence together but keeping the initiative alive needs a lot of work, and I cannot keep being responsible for everything myself.
How can we keep our initiative running? What does having an initiative like this in existence mean to you? How much time can you dedicate to our research, advocacy and campaigning?
Safi