By Keira Dignan | Project Co-ordinator
Firstly, a very happy new year to you from all of the volunteers here at ECHO! It’s been a busy year for us - we’ve drove 115,000km to reach over 2950 library users. I'll link our end of year report at the bottom of this letter if you'd like to see more.
Thank you again for supporting the library through your donation this autumn. In September our bank account was nearly empty again and we reached out for support to help us keep running sessions into 2020. People like you answered our call, and together we raised £4,290 (equiv 5021eur, or 5611usd).
Since then, we’ve been able to loan 626 books and distributed an estimated 1260 language learning resources. We’ve been able to keep running classes out of the library space - from formal English lessons through Arabic at Oinofyta refugee camp to informal exchanges over tea at the Victoria Square Project in Athens.
How did we use your money to do this? Well, so far we have:
The remaining funds will help us to continue covering costs like these in the coming months. Most importantly, the money you so generously donated - in addition to a grant from Help Refugees - will allow us to invest in a new van so that we can keep the library going long term. We will send you an update as soon as we have news!
In the meantime, we’d like to share with you a poem that one of our library users wrote. One ECHO volunteer, Amira (pictured here), spent her time with the library teaching English through Farsi to a small group of Afghani girls. They found that they shared a love of poetry, and by the end of their time together one of the students produced a poem that she translated into English. It is haunting and beautiful.
Love and solidarity from the library team here to you - have a wonderful new year!
***apologies for the tardiness of this report. I have been informed that some of our community are only recieving this report in February due to a technical error. We are still getting our head around this platform - we promise to have the next report at the end of this month on time. Thank you for your patience!
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
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