By Michael J Quinn | Co-founder
Greetings from Guatemala.
First Quarter Report 2024 – it’s not just the donations to the Integral Heart Family School here in Guatemala that are down, in fact, across all the major players, donations are down.
Just look at what Charity Navigator says here; ‘philanthropic activity is down 20% year-over-year since 2022’.
Integral Heart revenues have been trending at 18% down over this same period.
Even a major funding partner of ours, an international organization that supports 1000’s of small non-profits have cut their match programs and funding for 2024; the first time I have seen in our many years of working with this wonderful group.
How does a 18% reduction in donations happen?
Well, in two ways. The first is that we are seeing a dramatic drop off in our Monthly Sustaining Sponsors.
For those of you who follow our work, our monthly donors provide about one half of what we need to run our school and programs annually.
Since December 2023 we have lost $8,500 in annualized funding from monthly donors. A drop in monthlies is felt hard and since we are completely crowdfunded - many are even $10 per month - they all count to our loss. And it is also very difficult to replace our monthly donors.
The second area where we are seeing a decrease in support is in the area of ‘major’ donors.
To us, a major donor is a person who can give $2,000 or more in one year. The combination of the deficit in monthly donors and the pull back by major donors is creating our 18% drop in revenue projections to end-of-year 2024.
What does this mean to our work and programs?
Well, we have a plan to replace this loss by October 31, 2024.
If we cannot do this, and I won’t sugarcoat it, we are going to have to make cuts in accordance with the loss.
We do have a ‘slush fund’ but it’s not bottomless.
In hard numbers, we to add an additional $2,300 per month in cumulative donation for each of the next 6 months up to Oct 31 to make up this shortfall and to stave off cuts.
Is this the first crises in funding that the Integral Heart has had?
No, we have had several over the years but we able to more quickly figure out a way to garner new support and have continued our work tirelessly since 2011. But this first quarter of 2024 is revealing a troublesome trend.
Part of our plan to fix this slide in donation includes a significant widening of our reach into new networks of people who can learn about our work and become monthly or major donors. We will be doing this with in-person events this summer but also online for the next 6 months.
We hope that you can stand with us. Forward this newsletter with your personal recommendation.
All of our financial data and tax returns are available on our website. I put that link below.
With best wishes,
Mick Quinn
Debora Prieto
Co-Founders
Integral Heart Family School Guatemala.
https://www.integralheartfoundation.org/501c3status.htm
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