Frequently Asked Questions

Monayr Asha comes from Bengali which is the official language of Bangladesh and also spoken in West Bengal (eastern-most province of India). Literally, Monayr Asha means Heart's Desire or Deepest Desire.

What does the MAA logo mean?

The blue lotus signifies the wisdom of knowledge. The hand represents the hand of MAA nurturing and supporting a child's quest for this knowledge. It also represents the hands of the children holding the power of knowledge in their hands.

Where do administrative fees come from?

Every charity has administrative fees that are unavoidable. For example, admin fees for MAA include incorporating it and fees for setting up the website. MAA is meeting these admin fees through personal donations from family and friends with money donated specifically for this purpose. 100% of the money raised through our events and online donations will go towards actual charitable work.

Is MAA based only in Bangladesh?

Currently, MAA is based in Bangladesh and Uganda. However, MAA is hoping to expand into other projects in other parts of the world helping to provide a sustainable way of reaching out to children and their communities and helping them access the power of knowledge. The primary goal of MAA is to work with underprivileged children regardless of race or religion.

Why Chittagong in Bangladesh and Kasangati in Uganda?

The idea of starting a charitable organization to support educating children in developing countries came out of a combination of experiences: Fueled by Katrina Brandstadt's experience working in Uganda, and Kashfi Mahmud's background in Bangladesh, they formulated and implemented an idea to use their personal resources to work towards social justice in projects that would have long-reaching and long-lasting sustainable effects.

During a visit to Chittagong, Bangladesh, Kashfi visited a now-government-run public school, originally established by her grandfather for the purpose of educating under-privileged children. During the trip, Kashfi realized that most of the children supposed to be attending the school were unable to attend due to financial difficulties, although education was free. That is when she came up with the idea of raising money for scholarships to support some of the children. Thus, Chittagong, Bangladesh was a logical choice for the first project of the MAA Foundation.
Katrina's experience of working with Buwagga Senior Secondary School in Uganda lead to the decision to initiate a second MAA project to support students in Kasangati, Uganda.

Financial

How much money has to be raised to help the children in Bangladesh?

There is no real limit to how much we can help these children. Any amount raised will go a long way, as only $ 2.00 CAN are sufficient to support a child for a day. Our aim is to raise $ 17,000 CAN, allowing for 20 children to be sustained for a year. For more information, please visit the Project Bangladesh page.

Is part of the money raised going to the family?

The money raised aims to benefit these children in their overall life. Although the families do not receive direct cash benefits, the children receive nutritious meals provided by MAA, as well as health check-ups that are not the norm for those communities. Also, we provide support to the parents with monthly meetings addressing their needs.

If one fundraising event can only support the children's education for a certain period of time, how are you going to ensure that they will have a chance to complete their studies?

Currently, our projects are supported through fundraising events as well as private sponsorship, which both combined will ensure the ongoing support for these children, should they choose to go further with their education. In the event that a child has completed their formal education or chooses to discontinue with their schooling, another child will be chosen to support. We believe that even one year of education will open up more opportunities for these children, and hopefully give them a broader perspective of what options are open to them.

We are working with children in developing countries. Can you fund us?

MAA is not a grant-giving foundation. If you are looking for funding, have a look at the list of grant-giving foundations on Charity Village or on Dmoz.

Project Bangladesh

According to what criteria were the locations chosen? Are they chosen from a UN list of most impoverished schools?

We chose areas where no other NGOs (with similar education projects) are working. There is a lot of area where work needs to be done, and lots of NGOs are already active, so it seems redundant to be working in an area where others are already active, whereas there are so many that have no options. This was our priority. Another issue was capacity. For example, we chose areas that we felt we would be more capable of working with. In some areas for example, there were heroin dens. Given that our NGO is much smaller, we feel that we would be unable to cope with situations such as those, so we remained in areas that were more family oriented.

Are students chosen based on merit, relative impoverishment, with care to balance gender, race, religion, or are they personal friends and relatives of charity owners?

The first criterion was location. Second was income level, as we work with the ultra poor. Most of the children's families are brick breakers. For example, some of the children are partial orphans, which means they have no father or no mother, or one parent has a severe long-term impairment. The third criterion was age. As we work with a very small group, we picked children of a certain age group only. At project begin all children were aged around 7 (although most people have no idea of their age or their date of birth). In one area, that was sufficient to select a group of ten children. In the other area, we had a 3 round interview with the children, which was loosely based on a criterion evaluation drawn up by a team of two (Jaddon Park and another associate pursuing a Masters in Child Psychology). Another point taken into consideration was that the child had never previously been to school and did not have any possible future opportunity of going to school. In that case, it automatically balanced gender.

What happens to the remaining children in the village who do not receive anything?

The remaining children in the area go on as before. In some cases, we provide some extra care. For example, in Battiari we have a boy who used to go to school (he is about 12), but after his mother died, his extended family pulled him out of school. We did some mediation with the family, and arranged for him to be back at school. Since he was quite behind, we arranged for him to come to our program and sit with the teacher for an hour during the period that the other children are there for free play. We are trying to do the best we can with our extremely limited resources, but since our resources ARE limited, the support we can provide is also limited. Encouragingly, the community understands that, and simply supports us in our work. We hope that in the future there will be more possibilities to extend our activities.

Is MAA excluding boys and choosing mainly girls, or is MAA excluding one religion to the detriment of another?

We have not picked girls over boys. It has happened more organically, since the boys are given preference by their own family, which automatically disqualifies them from our program. We do not promote any one religion, rather teach tolerance and understanding and respect everyone's beliefs.

How is the work undertaken in Bangladesh? Are there MAA volunteers in Bangladesh?

MAA collaborates with a local NGO that is long established in the area of Chittagong. The NGO oversees the project and sends back reports to MAA, along with reports from the teacher and MAA appointed Program Coordinator. There are no current volunteers of MAA in Bangladesh. However, Jaddon Park and Kashfi Mahmud are both spending months at a time in Bangladesh working with the projects.

Working with us

I am looking for paid work, can I send you my resume?

MAA is a small grass-roots NGO entirely based on volunteers - unfortunately we cannot offer any paid positions at the moment. However, if you are interested in using your skills on a voluntary basis, don't hesitate to contact us.

Is it possible to do an internship with MAA?

Contact us and let us know what kind of experience you are looking for and what you are interested in doing - we can see and find out together if we have the capacities to support you in your learning experience. Unfortunately, we cannot remunerate interns.

Updates

Is there a way to be updated on the status of these children?

Our goal is to keep you as informed as we are ourselves. We hope to keep the website as updated as possible and have regular updates of the children sent to us, which we will put on the web as soon as received. Since we are run completely by volunteers, we do face challenges at times. You can also sign up for our newsletter here to stay informed about our activities.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Project Bangladesh

Working with us

Updates

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Project Bangladesh

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