Opportunity
Our mission isn’t in providing charity, but in sharing OPPORTUNITY. It’s about recognizing the strengths of others and giving them the opportunity to make an even bigger difference in their local community.
Giving money or clothing creates an immediate benefit once, maybe twice. But the gift of opportunity benefits generations to come. It welcomes a higher standard of living and reaffirms the inherent value of a community. That’s what we’re all about.
Agency
We believe in empowering local community leaders, making financial investments work as effectively as possible, supporting and strengthening existing systems that WORK, and connecting patrons with the very people they’re helping to support.
Our job is to support the agency of the people who are making a real difference so they can widen and deepen their impact. Oliva and others like her have the dream—we’re just there to support it.
Accountability
So often when we look for places to donate our time or money, we don’t necessarily know where our investment is going. We think… “Is that $1,000 I just donated actually going to build houses, or is it just paying for marketing campaigns and fundraisers?”
With Just One Foundation, you can actually see where your money is going. When you donate supplies or become a patron, you’ll read about the educational projects you’re helping support. When you volunteer your time, you’ll see the fruits of your labor as you interact with the very children you’re helping. We learned this lesson ourselves during one of our earliest trips to visit Oliva and La Fundación.
After a few days of learning about how the school was first created and supported by generous donations from the community, we were overcome with emotion and gave Oliva what little money we had in our pockets before flying home.
Together, we gave her around $1,300 US dollars and flew home on a Friday. That very Monday, we received a message from Oliva along with some photos. In the span of just three days, she’d…
- Purchased building materials for a new classroom,
- Hired (and paid) the parents of her students to help provide labor, and
- Built an extension to the school that she’d been working towards for over a year.
That’s the power of Oliva’s passion and determination to educate Cartagena’s kids. She takes advantage of every opportunity to make La Fundación a brighter home for her students, and we’ve seen the fruits of her labor firsthand.
It’s empowering and humbling to see the extending effects of your impact, and we hope to share that feeling with other Just One patrons in our own way.