Where your money goes

Donations to Global Footsteps do several things. First and foremost they allow us to fund volunteer opportunities. We believe that individuals should not be excluded from volunteering on the basis that they can not afford to fund their trip. This prevents volunteering on overseas projects from being a pursuit only affordable to the wealthy. When funding permits, we aim to send up to twenty volunteers a year to help out on projects in Kenya, Bangladesh, Jamaica, Poland, Slovakia, Turkey and the UK. This is why we exist, this is why we are a charity.

We receive a large volume of applications for our trips and are therefore able to select volunteers of high quality, who will make a big difference. Although, as a charity, we fully fund each volunteer trip, our volunteers are obliged to fund-raise on our behalf and we set them a target to cover at least half the cost of their trip. We see this as an important part of the volunteering experience, it helps the volunteer display a level of commitment to the cause and raises much needed awareness and funding for the charity.

In addition to our volunteer trips we also hold an international ‘Footstep’ conference every two years to bring together representatives from each of our linked projects. This is vital to sustaining the links we hold with these projects. We always encourage a mixture of young and senior representatives to attend. This allows for professional development of the project leaders and a platform for young adults to mix with people from different cultures. We have always strongly pursued this part of our program believing it is vital for the establishment of global peace and citizenship. Your donation will help us to continue with this important part of our programme.

As we are a small organisation, our overheads, in relation to the programme we deliver are low. We do however depend on core funding. We have a brilliant team of volunteers who support our Co-ordinator, without whom the programme would be extremely limited. Our co-ordinator oversees the administration, fund-raising, project management and awareness raising work of the charity. Your donation will ensure we can continue to employ a high quality co-ordinator to run our programme. A small amount of core funding is also vital for basic materials to help the charity do its work. We are as frugal as we can be, but we sometimes need to print things like posters, leaflets, reports and travel documents! More information on the various ways you can support us can be found in the rest of this ‘Donate’ section.