Shangrila Home : Donor Policy.
Shangrila Home (SH) is a non-profit organization working for the welfare of children in Nepal. The vision of the organization is that every child has the right to protection, health care and education. The objectives of the organization are to provide shelter, education and health care to underprivileged children and to re-integrate them into society through long-term and short-time care.
There is a need for extensive fundraising for the organization to be dynamic and successful. Thus our donors are the lifeblood of the organization and we are very grateful for their cooperation. Considering the importance of all people who contribute financially to our organization, this Donor Policy has been introduced in order to maintain transparency and clarity concerning our code of conduct.
All children who are admitted to SH are underprivileged. From the moment they become a beneficiary of our organization it is our intention to do something about that. We want to give them a happy childhood with a lot of love and care, rehabilitate them socially and afterwards reintegrate them into the Nepalese society through education. We are running a long-term child care home, a school-sponsoring program for children who are not at risk in their family environment, and a rehabilitation-reintegration program for street-adolescents with counseling, occupational therapy, literacy classes and short-term vocational trainings.
All financial contributions received on any of our project-accounts will be integrally used in Nepal where and how it is most urgent/necessary/convenient to run and manage our programs. The monthly amount for a full child-sponsorship is a calculated average which is needed to sustain the long-term child care project and the school-sponsoring program. A justification on how a financial donation was used by SH will be given to the donor if required and in that case we rely upon the trust and understanding of our donors to acknowledge that it was used where needed.
Especially for the long-term child care home and the school-sponsoring program we work with child-sponsoring, meaning that a certain donor can donate a contribution for a certain child. The following code of conduct is designed for this particular type of sponsorship.
Code of conduct:
- The children are very excited and happy to have one, two, or more ‘godmothers’ and ‘godfathers’ and they love to communicate with them. The basic communication expected from the child from our side, is a letter/drawing twice a year; once around Christmas and once around June.
- Apart from that the older children have access to the internet and under supervision they can use social media to communicate with their sponsors if they wish to do so and if the sponsor wishes to communicate in that way as well.
- However, there are some restrictions from the beneficiary’s side:
o An SH-beneficiary is not allowed to ask his/her sponsor for any kind of present or personal financial contribution. If he/she does so anyway, then we expect the donor not to comply and even to report this to the management.
o An SH-beneficiary is not allowed to personally invite his/her sponsor to visit his/her family in their home.
- Restrictions from the donor’s side: we would like to ask the donor:
o Not to encourage the child to ask for presents
o Not to invite the child to their home country
o To refrain from making deals/plans with the child without any knowledge of the management
o To refrain from making promises which go against the above mentioned objectives of the organization
- Any donor who decides to visit Shangrila Home and lets the management know about their plans, is of course always more than welcome and will get an extensive tour with a presentation of our programs. If you should bring any clothes, footwear, toys, sport equipment, first-aid, towels, school and arts material for general use it would be very much appreciated so that we can distribute these things at the appropriate time, although you are certainly not obliged to do so. If you should bring a small extra present for your ‘god-child’ that would be most appreciated too and the child will be very happy with the extra attention.
- However we would like to ask the visiting donor:
o To refrain from giving expensive gifts to their god-child which none of the other children will probably ever get.
o Never to give any money to the children directly. If you want to give money for them to buy something themselves, you can give it to the local management and it will be put on their ‘saving-book’ immediately, so that the child can collect if afterwards when he/she is ready to go shopping. The receipts will be collected as well. The younger children will always be accompanied by a social worker.
o Not to personally start distributing any items of general use they might have brought with them. We have certain timings on which we distribute certain items (clothes twice a year for example).
o Not to make any appointments with the child without asking permission to the management.
o To accept the fact that in case of an outing the younger children always have to be accompanied by an SH social worker and the older children at least by one of their friends, and that any outing will be limited to one day only, from an agreed time until an agreed time.
o Not to expect the child to take you to their family, in case they still have family, since this would create false expectations and misunderstandings.
o Not to expect the older beneficiaries to be your tour-guide/city-guide and not to expect them to accompany you on trips of multiple days.
o To inform the management if the child makes inappropriate requests or proposals.
o Not to provoke any emotional atmosphere that might bring the donor-child relation out of balance.
o Out of respect for the privacy of our beneficiaries we’d like to request you not to publish any pictures/clips of our children or staff on social media. However you can do this on the Shangrila Home Facebook page with permission of the workgroup.
This code of conduct has been installed to ensure that the organization can maintain a healthy balance between all beneficiaries and a good, open, honest and straightforward relationship between local care givers and beneficiaries, so that the final objective of reintegrating the beneficiary into the Nepalese society can be achieved.
Finally the members of the executive board of directors, the local management, the staff and all beneficiaries would like to thank all of our donors from the bottom of their hearts for providing Shangrila Home with the opportunity to run all programs and fulfill its mission.