Two temple congregations become the project's steadiest donors
- Published
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- MRN
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- Fundraising
The organisation's largest institutional donors in its first two years were not foundations. They were two Hindu temples in the Washington suburbs.
Rajdhani Mandir, in Northern Virginia, ran fundraisers inside and outside the temple in the weeks after the earthquakes. Its donations to Mission Rebuild Nepal included $10,000 recorded in July 2015 and $10,050 recorded in June 2016. The Washington Kali Temple in Maryland gave $15,000, announced in April 2016, having earlier pledged and begun paying a larger sum.
What makes the temple relationship worth recording is what happened between the first gift and the second. The mandir's board, choosing between organisations in Nepal, India and the United States, backed an outfit with no track record and then asked what had happened to the money.
Mandir management became pleasantly surprised when MRN provided such detailed proof of how the funds were used including the material cost up to a single nail/brick, names, records and pictures of the recipients of Mandir sponsored houses and audit trails showing that MRN is truly a zero overhead NGO. Mandir decided to sponsor another enhanced design 12 houses with shade for the livestock.
The second batch of twelve houses came with a modification the villagers had asked for: a covered space for livestock. In a subsistence economy on a hillside, an animal that dies of exposure is a household's savings gone.
