Like many initiatives, this project began informally, sparked by conversations between two friends. At the time, we were both in the final stages of our PhD program in biomedical science, and on one fateful sunny afternoon in 2024 - we started talking about philanthropy. We realized that both of us had long-term goals which involved doing good and giving back to humanity. But neither of us had undertaken a venture in philanthropy. As scientists, we were eager to experiment, learn, and develop through a small research endeavor of our own — a ‘pilot’ project, if you will.
We decided to embark on a project with internal goals of (i) giving back, (ii) gaining experience in running philanthropy projects with skin-in-the-game capital before been entrusted with external funding, (iii) to practice donating money effectively, (iv) to learn how money can best be used to help those in need, and (v) to learn about the conditions of the world outside of Australia/New Zealand.
Then, we centered our focus on the primary question – “what does it mean to run an optimal orphanage?” - and started from there.
Our milestones were drawn up as follows:
- Q1 2024 Conceptualize project
- Q2 2024 Research, design project
- Q3 2024 Website and philanthropy official launch
- Q4 2024 JC in field/implementation
- Q1 2025 Review and share learnings
We met monthly and began reading and watching material around this topic. Our learnings and unanswered questions were documented in a shared research document.
To add to the quality of the research, one of us visited Asia towards the end of our project (Q4) to conduct interviews and gather on-the-ground data. We believed that information gathered in-field would be most beneficial and accurate, which would supplement the information we gathered online.
The budget that we pooled between the two of us was a small sum of $6,000 Australian Dollars. This enabled us to experiment at a small scale and it was deemed enough to create some impact in the regions we were interested in.
Everything that we’ve learnt, we want you to have. Over the next series of posts, we’ll present all our findings. We hope that this knowledge will help spread awareness on this crucial issue and foster a better environment for children in need of support.