Phase 1 of the journey completed
Dear all,
We will close our fundraising event "12,000 km on cycles for adequacy in rural India" in support of the glass half full in the next few days.
With your outstanding support, we have raised 2,551 Euro through this event alone, of which 2,502 Euro went towards our daily expenses during this incredibly intense 3-month trip. As you most likely already heard or read somewhere in our blog or Facebook entries, Kalyan and I covered 5,162 km in these 90 days, getting in-depth insights into the lives of villagers and tribals in the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. Thanks to the hospitality of so many individuals and NGO's we managed to nearly pay for all our on-road expenses during these 90 days from the funds raised here. This means, our real expenses were almost half of what we had anticipated.
We are still traveling on and off - with Wiebke mainly working out of Auroville in Tamil Nadu and Kalyan working on the ground at ProtoVillage in Andhra Pradesh to implement our lessons learnt one by one and make use of the political support offered. As opposed to original plans and for reasons already mentioned in earlier posts, we will not travel through the other 26 states of India right now - aka, no additional km funding is required right now.
However, we do explore ways to continue mapping the social landscape of India ourselves as well as independent from our own very limited capacity. For this purpose, we work on ways to invite others into this (ad)venture as many friends and volunteers expressed their eagerness to come along with us or contribute in a region/dimension of their choice. We will still use our 12 dimensions to cluster change makers and their solutions. At the same time, we aim to create a framework that makes it easier for others to figure what exactly to map, how and where. This thinking process is supported by TFOEM and their initiative Searching for Goodness (http://www.facebook.com/searchingforgoodness) as well as by ATMA Mumbai (http://atma.org.in/).
PS: The remaining 48 Euros raised through this event were donated for a computer cable, which is urgently needed right now, along with a new laptop to replace Wiebke's MacBook that refused to swim :-). If you can support us in replacing it, please visit us on http://www.betterplace.org/en/projects/4141-the-glass-half-full-it-matters-what-we-measure
Thank you all for enabling us to go on this journey and come out of it renewed in spirit and strenghtened in intention. Your donations, cheering along the way, sharing of stories, helping us through our many technology (and other) challenges and always having an open ear when needed!!!
With love,Kalyan + Wiebke