Fundraiser Dec 2020
$2,305 raised for 700 children’s Christmas gifts and 800 hot meals
Benefitting Asociación Deredez Por Víctimas Coonacionales de la Frontera and the Alfonso Gomez community
Screenshot of fundraiser webpage. Click the image to visit the page.
Our initial goal was $1,600 for 400 Christmas gift bags and 800 meals for the Asociacion Deredez on the Venezuelan border outside Cucuta, Colombia. Because we exceeded the goal by $705, we helped Deredez purchase a kitchen stove, and we assembled an additional 300 gift bags for the Alfonso Gomez settlement of mostly displaced Venezuelans.
Find a full report of the campaign below.
Each Christmas gift bag contained colored pencils, markers, a notebook and a coloring book.
Why Christmas gifts? Many parents struggle every day to secure food and shelter, but come down hard on themselves when they have nothing to make the holiday season special for their children. The gifts, art sets, give kids tools for creative development and help ease the minds of worried parents.
What is Asociacion Deredez? It’s a women-led community organization based in the home of its founder Ana Teresa, herself displaced by conflict several times on both sides of the Colombia-Venezuela border in the last 30 years. It helps vulnerable populations in the impoverished border zone, primarily children, young mothers and the elderly. I first met Ana Teresa when working as a journalist in 2017 and I’ve followed her good work for years.
What is the Alfonso Gomez community? It is one of the region’s many informal settlements where families displaced by the crisis in Venezuela or elsewhere in Colombia gather to build crude shelters in the wilderness. I met the community when working as a journalist in 2019. Many families suffer for lack of food and many children don’t attend school.
Summary of Activities
We arrived in Cucuta on Dec 11 2020 and spent $3,981,250 Colombian pesos (about USD $1,162) at a local wholesaler of school supplies called “Cacharreria Sumas y Restas.” That bought 700 notebooks, 700 boxes of colored pencils, 700 coloring books and 350 boxes of markers, which we split up. Elsewhere we spent about $60 on 700 Christmas-decorated plastic bags.
On our hotel room floor, we sorted, bagged and boxed the 700 art kits.
We delivered 500 of these gift bags to Ana Teresa Castillo Ramos, director of the Asociación Deredez para Victimas de la Frontera Conacionales, in La Parada, outside Cucuta.
We brought the other 200 to the Alfonso Gomez community and gave them to Sonia, a local social leader we had worked with before. She took care of distributing them to area kids and sent back a ton of photos.
We wired USD$800 to Ana Teresa at Asociación Deredez to feed people during Christmas celebrations. The execution of the traditional Colombian Christmas celebration had to be modified due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Ana Teresa asked to use some of the funds to buy a large stove. Previously she could use her community-sized pots over wood fire in the street. With our funds, she made and distributed rice with meat and vegetables on four separate occasions.
Because of the Coronavirus, Ana Teresa couldn’t host large events to distribute gifts and food. So she and her team took the gifts to communities and offered food on multiple small occasions. Here are some pictures she sent.
An additional $240 was spent on transportation, lodging and materials for the campaign.