Natik: Let’s go fishing.
Greetings! In May we commemorate International Worker’s Day, Family Day, Mother’s Day, Diversity and Dialog Day, and Biodiversity Day to name a few of my favorites. (Yes, there are more!)
So may your May be full of flowers, may your work bring you joy, may your family fill your heart, may your mother be honored, may your diversity be lively, and may your garden have lots of little green sprouts!
For some odd reason, the eclectic variety of May’s celebrations reminds me of a favorite proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
I'm sure you agree that this familiar saying is a perfect metaphor for all types of experiential learning.
However, I'd be willing to wager that in the relentless rip tides of daily life, it’s often much easier to give away fish than to take the time to go on an allegorical fishing expedition! 🐠
Don’t get me wrong; sometimes, giving away fish (or lots of fish) is exactly what’s needed.
However, sometimes we skip the teach-learn opportunities in favor of expediency. What we gain in time we lose in knowledge transfers, which are incremental and cumulative.
Knowledge is power and it’s transformative; when you know something, you can’t un-know it. Every little bit of experiential teach-learn we engage in changes the world because what people know can’t be taken away. Plus, the best way to learn is to teach -- so everyone wins when we set aside expediency long enough to share what we know in a way that includes all of us.
Your loyal generosity means that our staff can focus on helping our partners learn the art and science of fundraising. They all live and work in marginalized communities of poverty and extreme poverty. In other words: they have no direct contact with people who have enough discretionary income to donate.
Therefore, we prioritize experiential learning opportunities related to digital fundraising and grant proposals. We also encourage them to develop products and services that can contribute to local incomes and help subsidize their programs.--- but that’s another subject! 😊
You’ll be pleased to know that in the past year, our partners raised almost $10,000 on DonorSee from hundreds of $1-20 dollar donations. Besides learning another strategy to generate funding for programs, our partners learned to extract project budgets out of annual budgets and how to produce videos that meet the DonorSee criteria.
Through this millennials-and-younger digital fundraising platform, our partners are sharing their work with thousands of people who wouldn't have known about them otherwise.
Natik’s current teach-learn opportunity is the upcoming social media fundraiser in June. We skipped last year’s because we were getting up to speed for DonorSee. This year we’re excited to integrate what we've learned since the last online fundraiser in 2021.
Next week we'll kick off our fundraising season with a Google Meet digital pep rally with our partners, the Natik team, volunteers, and even some board members! During the ten days of the campaign (June 9-18) we'll share an abundance of lively content on all our social media platforms.
You'll get an email reminder on June 9th with easy-click links so you can enjoy the many stories, photos, and videos they’ll be crafting and assembling in the next few weeks.
Until then, remember to grab your fishing pole and teach some lucky person how to fish!
🐠🐡🐠Anita Smart
Executive Director
P.S. Please feel free to respond to this email or schedule a time on my calendar so we can talk.