Community outreach
Our mission is to empower children from vulnerable and disadvantaged backgrounds by supporting projects in health, education and social welfare. Every peso of member dues goes toward that.
Members do this themselves
MIWA has no grants department. The work of finding projects, checking them and staying with them is done by the Committee on Community Outreach, known as COCO, which is made up of members who want to be involved. Any member can ask to join, and there is no limit on how many do.
What that involves, in practice:
- Visiting schools and non-profit organisations, together with other members
- Asking local businesses for donations and discounts
- Buying what a project needs, carefully and within budget
- Proposing new projects and new collaborations
- Staying in contact with a partner organisation for the whole life of a project, and going to see it
- Arranging collaborations with organisations and businesses
- Giving time
Each project has a named member who stays in touch with the partner organisation and reports on how it is going. That is the part that tends to get skipped, and it is the part that decides whether the money did anything.
What we will and will not fund
The bylaws are specific about this, and the rules exist so that decisions do not have to be argued from scratch every year.
We fund
- Officially registered schools and non-profit organisations whose work aligns with our mission
- Projects close enough that a member can travel there and back in a day, because members visit the projects they fund, and a project nobody can get to is a project nobody can check
- Health, education and social welfare for children from vulnerable and disadvantaged backgrounds
We do not fund
- Salaries, rent, travel or accommodation forming part of a partner organisation’s ordinary running costs
- Anything with a religious or political objective. MIWA is non-religious and non-political
- Organisations that are not officially registered
How a project is chosen
1. COCO selects the organisations
Once a year, the committee identifies and vets organisations to partner with, against the criteria above.
2. The membership votes
Once organisations have been vetted and selected, MIWA as a whole votes on a specific project. A vote passes on a majority of those who take part. Members have 72 hours to cast a vote, or less if a decision is genuinely urgent and is flagged as such.
3. A member stays with it
COCO appoints a member to maintain contact with the partner for the duration of the project and to evaluate how it is progressing.
4. Members are told how it ended
When a project finishes, the membership is informed of its outcomes and its conclusion. If it becomes clear that children are no longer benefiting from a funded project, the COCO Chair or the President can stop the funding.
5. The relationship is reviewed each year
Partnerships are reviewed annually to check that they still fit MIWA’s mission and that the collaboration is working.
Where the money comes from
Member dues, and nothing else. UYU 5,000 per member per year.
All of it is allocated to community outreach. Up to 20% of the total collected may be earmarked for the costs of running the volunteer activities and projects themselves: the materials, the supplies, the practical things a project needs in order to happen. Nothing goes to administration, because there is no administration to pay for.
Working with MIWA
If you run a registered school or non-profit organisation in or near Montevideo whose work is with children, and you think it might fit what is described above, we would like to hear from you.
Please tell us what the organisation does, where it is, and what a project with us might look like. Proposals go to the Committee on Community Outreach, which reviews and selects partner organisations once a year, so a reply may not be immediate.