“TASHAKUR” a project to serve Humanity

“Be Thankful for What You Have; You’ll End-up having more!” Three young, passionate, thrilled students (by the way, I am one of them:)…) had a dream to serve humanity by reducing people’s food and medical needs. All we were residing in different cities of Pakistan. Our names are Erum Munir, Zahoor Akbar, and Fatima Maqsood. One day, by chance we three individually thought that why don’t we turn our dream into reality (as we didn’t know each other but we have same dreams). To bring our ambitions into existence, we planned (solely) to join a well-known academy named Amal Career-Prep Fellowship funded by Stanford University (because we heard about that academy that it always provide opportunities to all its applicants to fulfill their ambitions or goals). Fortunately, we were selected by passing every test or trial of Amal academy. By the blessing of Divine, our Program Associate(PA) Mam Hajira Ijaz and Program Manager(PM) Mam Rabia Noor Qadir had chosen us for a same Mega Circle (Mega Circle 06). In this way, we three innovative, laudable, fellows with same dreams met each other. When we were assigned Mega Projects by our batch PM and PA(as I told you that Amal Academy provide opportunity to its every fellow to go extra mile), We immediately decided to work on our goal (if you forget, No problem! it was “serve humanity by reducing people’s food and medical needs”). We sent our Mega project proposal to our Program Manager. After some corrections our PM had approved our project proposal.(I know! you also want to know about our Problem statement, Theory of change, and Business Model Canvas)

here, it is!

So, in short it was our actual aim. Now it’s time to think why I write word “Tashakur” as the title of this blog, actually;

We named our project Tashakur/تشکر, a word that would demonstrate the whole purpose of the project. “Tashakur” is an Urdu word which means “Thanksgiving”.

=Alhamdulillah! we are the blessed ones that we sleep satiated at night, we don’t fear about our expenses and we don’t have to worry about our next meal(kindly say Thanks to Allah). We are the fortunate ones.q But there are some people who struggle on a daily basis for a single piece of bread. In their tough time,there is a need for such efforts that not only ease them but also satiate their appetite. We are being thankful for what we have,by helping those women .Our major focus is the women community, those women(single mothers/divorcees/widows) who are solely managing their houses.

Women in Pakistan face problems daily, especially those women who are alone in the society. Social stereotypes restrict these women. Due to all those restrictions and taboos, women become dependent on society. Even if a woman tries to earn money for her family, the community lays hurdles in their path. Sadly, as a community we fail these women. Apart from these reasons, some women are unable to earn money themselves, it occurs due to some health issues or due to lack of their education.As young aspirants we took an initiative for helping such families who are managed by such brave women. We aim to provide them ration packages, so they’ll have a nice meal.

Our project involves major tasks including:

1. Collection of donations
2. Making a list of things need to be included in ration
3. Finding deserved families (managed solely by woman)
4. Buying ration
5. Delivering ration to deserved ones
6. Getting medicines (if required)

Our PLANS for Achieving goals:

For the collection of donations, we aimed this task to be a gradual process, so we considered it as a side task that will be carried throughout the project simultaneously.

But for the first phase of our project we aimed for Rs.20,000 donations in a 2 week period. Gladly, we accomplished this target in a week. We made an Instagram and Facebook page named “tashakur” for the promotion of the project.

We posted calls for donations through whatsapp contacts and stories. Our targeted audience for donations was our relatives/family/friends. Because it was the beginning of our project, we couldn’t ask unknowns as they wouldn’t believe us.

Whatsapp status

We decided that we will make the first phase of the project as evidence of our performance and authenticity for further proceedings of collection of donations.

Fortunately, we were able to collect Rs. 33,730 in Multan, Lahore, Sargodha in only 1.5 week span :). We made a list of things that needed to be included in the ration package and made a rough estimate of the cost of each package which was Rs. 2000. List of the things that we bought were the following:

1. Wheat flour 10 kg
2. Rice 2kg
3. 4 kinds of Cereals ½ kg each
4. Chick peas ½ kg
5. Sugar 1 kg
6. Ghee 2 kg
7. Black tea
8. Red spices

Due to pandemic and difficulty in meeting in person (as each fellow was from a different city),

The first phase of ration delivery was done in Multan by Erum Munir and Zahoor Akbar in Sargodha and by Fatima Maqsood in Lahore. For the purpose of finding families, we asked our immediate relatives if they knew any such families. Luckily, they found 15 deserved families (collectively)(Alhamdulillah! we three have delivered).

All our group members are working efficiently and motivating each other to get our marks. Erum has a very big contribution to this project and she has helped us a lot to collect the funds. She is also running the Instagram page of our project.

https://www.instagram.com/invites/contact/?i=okdqc32wfhph&utm_content=lyb1dzm

Our mega circle leader Fatima (means I am) organizing meetings to discuss the updates about the project. I am also working on funds collection for provision of medicines to needy people by collaborating with Medicare Society (a mega circle of batch 192) just to try to go an extra mile in serving humanity. I have delivered medicines to one person of costs 2500/- so far (because we have aimed that we will provide medicines if required)

Our third group member Zahoor is also working on funds collection and he is also running our Facebook page where he is promoting the project.

https://www.facebook.com/Tashakur-تشکر-100533082213801/

In short, if I summarize the division of tasks: we three have decided that we three will collect donations in our own cities(because of severe Covid pandemic issue and also our residence in different cities).

These were details of our 1st phase of provision of Ration We are still working on it. Stay with us till next phase and learnings (that we have learnt from this process)

Stay blessed!