Brainstormers needed, enthusiasm guaranteed!
August 23, 2008
Primary objective
- securing or creating a sustainable source of income for the organisation known as the Kampala Junior Team (KJT), a fledgling sporting academy with big ambitions and an overriding concern for the welfare of it’s members
Primary means
- collaborative online pooling of talent
Guiding principle
- give what you gain, you’ll gain more then you give
Short term goals
- creating and consolidating a network of interested parties and individuals, to include artists, entrepreneurs, PR people, the tech savvy, sports fans, journalists, aid and development workers, the KJT organisers in Kampala, and anyone else who has ideas, experience, or practical help to offer.
Assets
- 3 successful boys’ football teams and a newly created girls’ team
- 3 dedicated and hard-working organisers on the ground
- a small but supportive network of individuals with varying degrees of experience in the field of international development (to date, soccer boots and kits, 70 GBPounds and 1 computer have been donated thanks to the Facebook groups Boots for a Soccer Team , Kayiwa Fred’s Computer Club and the KJT Wales Supporters Club)
Ambitions
- solving the problem of housing and caring for the 20 or so orphaned young team members who currently stay with coach Kabugo (and who do not attend school as they have no means of paying their school fees – education costs in Uganda)
- developing and expanding the range of sporting, social and educational opportunities the KJT provides in the community
- ultimately enabling the KJT to function successfully as a social business and to manage it’s own structural and financial affairs
The next step I envisage a collaborative blog entitled KJT International.
Interested ? Please leave a comment.
More information on the KJT can be found here :
http://www.onehelpinganother.com/
Posted by ceris62
Filed in Education, International Development, Philanthropic, Social Enterprise, Sport, blogging, networking
Tags: brainstorming, campaign, collaboration, design, Education, enterprise, football, media, promotion, soccer, social, Sport
3 Comments » Filed in Education, International Development, Philanthropic, Social Enterprise, Sport, blogging, networking
Tags: brainstorming, campaign, collaboration, design, Education, enterprise, football, media, promotion, soccer, social, Sport
August 23, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Great to see the blog!
Sometimes I have ideas that must not be very good because nothing ever comes of them, but I just can’t seem to give them up.
One idea about revenue generation is having the group make something to sell. Obviously one big problem is making something that costs practically nothing to make and doesn’t cost much to send. Transportation costs are significant as any investigation of paper bead schemes will show. But a product that’s come to mind is string bags.
Here in the USA people are slowly adopting the practice of taking their own shopping bags with them when they go shopping. It’s a good thing to do. So the idea of selling string bags has the advantage of allowing people selling them to tell a story about the KJT.
Clearly such sales wouldn’t be a long term income. Say for example a church group decided to sell bags, they might sell a couple of dozen. But there probably wouldn’t be long term demand, once the church members had their bags they probably wouldn’t keep buying them. But if the marketing sold the story of KJT perhaps there would be ongoing interest in sustaining the activities.
Not a specific suggestion, but check out fd’s Flickr Toys, in particular the Pocket Album. That’s a very useful tool. Another useful tool is the Trading Cards.
People often like to save and trade cards. The slow Internet connections make it hard to make the cards in Uganda, plus there is the money involved. But over time perhaps photos of kids, in particular kids in special need, could be uploaded along with a brief story, then volunteers could make cards for them. I can see how the cards could be useful for garnering small donations especially if there was some trading–Collect the whole set! where a card or two is rare–the physical media provides a way for the fund raising effort to travel.
August 23, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Thanks John, great to have your thoughts here!
One course of action I thought might be worth exploring is to identify goods or services that the KJT could make/provide for the local and regional market – a bicycle repair shop, as a random example, or an internet cafe, I know the latter is something the KJT would dearly love.
On the international side of things, it seems to me I’ve been missing the obvious lately – at the heart of the KJT is a football club, and football clubs are businesses, they make money! Your Trading Cards idea links into this, as does the suggestion a friend made yesterday which was to create a virtual International League which would include the KJT teams and junior teams from other countries. Obviously they wouldn’t be playing eachother (though that would be very cool) so points would be calculated simply tallying wins, draws and losses made by the teams in their real-time leagues.
I’m now thinking I may need two separate blog threads, one for tackling the work of promoting the KJT abroad, the other for helping the KJT figure out what they can do to start generating their own income.
August 25, 2008 at 10:03 am
Hello Ceris and Powers
I am glad for your thoughts
i always think big how we can have a side small Income for KJT and as Powers you know all my thinking goes to start a cyber cafe for many reasons like
having access to Internet by these kids in our community,
training them how to blog and so on and then having many people use internet at small fee
then for the girls the making of paper beads and bags is a nice and excellent idea when we have a particular place to make them from, and sale them.
and more ideas can comep up thanks for your thinking big towards KJT