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    1st November 2011:  One day to make a difference   

    Five reasons to give   

Here are five reasons why you should consider giving to support the work of Nuevas Esperanzas:

1.     We are a small organisation working in a small corner of a small country making a big difference. 

Your support really matters.  We mean that.  It's not small change to us.  We recognise and value the role of big international organisations when it comes to large scale coordinated relief efforts in the world's trouble spots.  But even the largest organisations can find that their resources are spread rather thinly when they are trying to cover the needs of the whole world!  We're not trying to cover the whole world.  In fact we're not even trying to cover the whole of Nicaragua.  But we are making a real and tangible difference to the lives of the people we work with.  Our sustained effort over the last six years has helped bring lasting transformation to rural communities.  We believe that development work is about quality and not just quantity, and that is where our strengths lie.

Have a look at some of our news stories to see the difference we have made to rural communities in Nicaragua.

2.    Your money helps us get more money.

Nuevas Esperanzas is able to access funds from a range of donor organisations.  Over the last six years we've learnt a lot about how to apply for grants and we've started to pick up funds from a wide range of organisations including churches, corporate donors, charitable trusts, local government and even UN bodies like the World Health Organisation.  One of the tricks of the trade we've learnt about is 'leverage'.  Many funding organisations like to see that, when we ask for a grant for a specific project, we are committing some of our own resources as well.  Some have rules that say that they will only fund 60% of a project, for example.  This means we need money to ask for money.  So the more you give us, the more we can ask for from others.

See where our project funding has come from by looking at our project page.

3.    We don't have lots of running costs.

I know everyone says that, so maybe we need to explain why we really mean what we say.  Nuevas Esperanzas is registered as a charity in the UK and as a non-profit in the US.  We have a board of trustees in the UK and a board of directors in the US but none of them gets paid anything for the work they do for us.  We don't have an office or any salaried staff in the UK or the US and we manage everything from our small office in León, Nicaragua.  We run a tight ship in Nuevas Esperanzas.  Our staff turn in timesheets, our vehicle mileage is meticulously logged and our cash is managed as if it were our own.  By keeping our running costs down, we think we can make your money go a long way.

Download our last year's annual report and accounts to see how we managed our money.

4.    Our projects really work.

Our team of mostly Nicaraguan professionals has really got it together.  We've had a steep learning curve and not everything has gone smoothly over the last six years.  But we've found something we're good at and our projects really do work.  Whether it's the rainwater harvesting systems we've been building or the beekeeping we've introduced as a sustainable alternative to slash and burn farming, our projects have really captured the imagination of our beneficiaries, local authorities and other NGOs.  And now they all want us to do more.  Even our more recent work on arsenic contamination of water supplies has already brought us international recognition and requests to upscale our investigation.

Read a technical evaluation of the impact of rainwater harvesting on hillside communities.

5.    We are a small organisation with a big heart.

The world of international development has become highly professional and business-like.  We support that.  We need highly trained and qualified people to help us ensure that we follow good practice, that we really understand what people need and that we don't create dependency by doing things for people that they could do for themselves.  But in our pursuit of excellence we don't want to lose sight of what our work is all about: people.  To us, poverty is spiritual as well as material and so our work needs to be highly relational as well as technical.  We work tirelessly to promote cooperation where conflict prevails and our ground-breaking ecumenical approach has raised hopes, as well as one or two eyebrows, in a society deeply divided along religious and political lines.

Watch a short film on our YouTube channel which gets to the heart of what we do.

Nuevas Esperanzas UK is a registered charity in the UK (No. 1116109) and is also registered in Nicaragua as an international NGO (No. 3537).

Nuevas Esperanzas US is a 501(c)(3) registered non-profit organization in the United States.