MY HEART WITH VENEZUELA

Dear Friend,

You subscribed to email updates from MY HEART WITH VENEZUELA by I Love Venezuela Foundation, a project on GlobalGiving. Here's the unedited update from the field: 

Thanks for Having Us in Mind. We are very grateful for the collaboration we have received from you, every effort counts and helps.

In the last three months we have added to our program four foundationsthat need our help. Now there are 27 foundations in Venezuela in the area of health, education and social development that we are helping. That means more than 40.000 families helped. 

But in Venezuela there are millions of people who need help. The crisis that Venezuela is going through today is harder than ever, and we need you to support us in everything you consider possible, so we can continue to feeding and educating our children, collaborating with hospitals, with the people living in the more remote areas, and giving a hand to those who need it the most.

In short, what Venezuelans need nowadays is: food from the basic basket, medicines of all kinds, diapers, baby formula, pediasure and nutritional supplements.

We are counting on you, today and always.

Links:

• Donate to I Love Venezuela Foundation

This project report is a submission to GlobalGiving's 2017 Fail Forward Contest, where organizations are asked to share a story of when they tried something new that didn't go as planned and how they learned from it. Enjoy!

This foundation wasn't born of hard work (that came later), it borned of the hard party.

About 5 years ago, the hardest stage of my life knocked on my door. In those days, my sister passed away of cancer, and three very close friends died too. Until that moment, I was a very homely person, I didn't like to go out. But when I was involved in that situation, I felt devastated, I didn't know what to do, I got tired of so much pain, and to see so many people suffer... so one day I said: "I want to forget."

From that moment, I started to go out to all the parties, I went to all the heat games, I went out every night, looking for (without knowing it) a second chance to go ahead. I saw many things that impacted me, among them, to see how much money was spent on parties with no meaning. That made me think about "something has to be done with this". I found my true calling on this path.

I am very grateful to have always had people who were there for me, to support me. That made me to want to be there for them too, for all those who had helped me in some way, and thus I realized everything that my country (Venezuela) had done for me. So I decided to do the same to help it too.

We all have the right to fall and get up. Life gave me a second chance, and with it I founded I Love Venezuela Foundation along with two more friends. We strive to make a night for Venezuela, to raise funds and help many NGOs that work hard there. Many of the people I met at the parties were the first to support us. We grew, people got engaged with our cause, we made many mistakes, but we learned from them too, and here we are. We have already celebrated four successful charity galas, and every day we count on more people, sponsors and companies that believe in us.

All this was a transformation process. If I had not gone through all that, I would never have come to the idea of the Foundation. Sometimes we have to live tough things to have the opportunity to get ahead. I Love Venezuela Foundation has become a bridge so we can all be better persons, help others, and deliver a message of love.

Thanks for being part of this.

Love,

Santi