Habitat for Humanity Meeting

Habitat for Humanity Organisation has provided us with the ability to assist them with their projects. For us it is very important to maintain our connection with this organisation enabling us to support those who are in need. Last week we had asked a few members from Habitat including the Head of corporations to come to OSC and meet with our service group. Over the past few months we have set up a number of individual fundraising projects to raise awareness. 

The meeting was necessary for us due to the fact that we hadn’t been in connection with them over a long period of time and we needed to know what was happening. The last build we went on was in Trincomalee and that was the “Youth Build” organised by Habitat itself. Since then we haven't been able to go on many builds and we were interested to know what our funds were going for to make sure that we wouldn't be raising money for the wrong reason. The process of making a build possible takes a long period of time and that was something we were not sure about, we needed to understand their processes and look for alternative solutions to assist them as well as become more productive with our time. 

With the money we raise where do our funds go and what are they being used for? 

Can builds be established faster or is there a process that needs to happen? 

These two questions were presented to them from us as a Service Group to better help understand the situation at hand. One of the Habitat for Humanity representatives explained to us the steps and time that it takes in order to make one of the builds possible. 

Transportation cost, land ownership, payment of building material, advertisement of the project were one of their biggest challenges faced when trying to organise a build for us. The weren’t raising enough funds to make everything possible and this made things a lot harder to organise as they were limited to certain resources. We were able to establish a solution for this problem which came from the students themselves. Having students with parents who work for high end companies we were able to come up with enough funds for the organisation to maintain their planning process for these builds. 

The housing cost is a big issue for us, depending on the location of construction their are fixed prices set for building houses. In Matara a house would cost 600,000 rupees where as an area that had a marshy terrain would cost 800,000 rupees. We have raised 250,000 rupees and we strive to collect more but we do understand that raising that much money will become a big challenge for us to achieve given the limited amount of time we have. We look to interacting with other organisations to see if they would like to match us with our funds and donate some money for our cause. If that ends up being a success then we will be able to raise the amount of money needed over a shorter period of time.