Our 10th year: Thank you for believing in the crazy idea of a 23 year old setting up a charity

Yes, starting this charity was initially my idea, but I am eternally grateful for the thousands of supporters we have and the incredible volunteers who are so generous with their time. I am just so amazed by those that choose to support Made with Hope. We are just a small volunteer-run charity that gives 100% of your donation to our education projects for children living in poverty in rural Tanzania.

I don’t really like Made with Hope to be about me in the slightest. I’d much rather the attention be on the incredible children, women and men that come together to make their community a better and more hopeful place for future generations. To me, they are just incredible.

How it all started

I know I do have to acknowledge that starting Made with Hope was my crazy idea as a 23-year-old. This Easter weekend 10 years ago, I sat with a cute notepad and pen from Paperchase (I’m a stationery nerd) and wrote down some ideas of how or who I could help in the world.

I’ve always been charitable. A given from having two parents that both worked in community development and the children’s charity sector. However, after university I couldn’t help but feel quite self-indulgent and how there’s got to be more to life than just working and spending money on things I didn’t really need.

In my notepad, I started to think about ways in which I could help. I had no fundraising experience, no proper network other than my friends who were skint students and I was in and out of hospital waiting for surgery on my hips. But I decided to set myself a target to spend my time after work honing my arts and craft skills and making things to sell. I figured this might be a good way to fundraise for some amazing causes.

So that is what I did. I crafted, knitted and glued all sorts of things…

 
 
 
 

Deciding to help the poorest children

After raising £250 for other causes over the next few months I started to become really interested in supporting causes in sub-Saharan Africa where millions of children were living in extreme poverty with no water, education or food. I started to become so obsessed with why these children’s lives were so different to mine. Why was it just because I was born in the UK that my most basic human rights such as clean water, food, shelter, education and access to health care were immediately covered? I came from a single-parent family where we did struggle to pay the bills but on the whole, I literally never worried about these basic things.

I decided I wanted to help children living in extreme poverty. I got my cute notepad out again and began planning a trip to Tanzania, a sub-Saharan country that is the 172nd poorest country in the world (out of 190) and is on the UN’s list of least developed countries. I then saved up from my retail job and flew to Tanzania to see if there was a project I could get involved in. Although I’d never been to a developing country like Tanzania, I had no worries at all - the naivety of a 23-year-old is blissful.

When I arrived I was just amazed at the state of the schools the children were learning in. They were literally falling down. There was definitely no lunch being served, no clean water and often no toilets to use. I just could not believe that children were turning up to these schools every day to learn so they could hopefully one day find a well-paid job and avoid living in extreme poverty like their parents.

Our impact

I was lucky to find a local Tanzanian charity doing amazing things that I partnered with from November 2013. Although it took me over 5 months to raise the first £1,000 because I was so rubbish at asking people for money, Made with Hope supporters have generously donated over £550,000 helping to improve the education of 25,918+ children who live in extreme poverty.

We’ve worked with 13 dedicated and passionate Tanzanian communities to:

Thank you to the moon and back

I am just so grateful to every single person that supports us. The donation email notification I get in my inbox still makes me so happy! After 10 years I’m so proud of where we’ve got to as a charity and I cannot wait to continue supporting thousands more children in Tanzania in the near future.

If you have a real ambition to help give a better future to some of the most amazing children, then please be part of our tribe and donate, run a 10k for us or just tell people about us. We are a small and friendly team of volunteers where 100% of any donation goes to the projects in Tanzania that directly help give children a better education.

Love Eleanor xxx

Founder of Made with Hope

A bit more about how and why we started is here.

Eleanor Riley