New online donation system

We are now using Virgin Money Giving for Online Donations. They are a non-profit organisation offering the cheapest way for charities to receive donations online. If you would like to donate to us or if you want to fundraise for us, Virgin Money Giving provides an easy way to do so.

A Taste for Ethiopia - Auction Brochure

This weekend is 'A Taste for Ethiopia' which is your only chance to experience real Ethiopian food and culture in Bristol. Book your tickets now!

The Auction Brochure is now available online. You can place your bids if you are unable to attend on the 17th or get a sneak preview of the lots if you are going to be there.

The evening promises to be great fun with authentic Ethiopian food, bar, display of Ethiopian artefacts, shop to purchase all your Christmas presents, auction and last but not least a special celebrity guest!

A Taste for Ethiopia is nearly upon us!

17th October 2009 @ 7.30pm

Tickets cost £15 To book please email: event@for-ethiopia.com or call 0117 3774347

The Incredible Human Journey - Dr Alice Roberts

Last night was fantastic with a large turnout to hear Dr Alice Roberts talk about her BBC series 'The Incredible Human Journey'.

Alice was inundated with requests to sign copies of her book and then received a sponsorship cheque from Dr Elaine Lunts who had run the Bristol Half Marathon on behalf of For-ethiopia

Alice will also be attending the next For-ethiopia event, 'A Taste for Ethiopia' on Saturday 17th October at Woodlands, Clifton (tickets available by email).

A big thank you to Dr Alice Roberts for this event as half of the proceeds are to be donated to For-ethiopia.

This Saturday

It is this Saturday that Dr Alice Roberts will be giving an illustrated talk on her BBC series 'The Incredible Human Journey' at St Mary Redcliffe Church.

Apparently ticket sales have been going well and due to the size of St Mary Redcliffe Church there should still be room for those who wish to pay on the door.

Tickets are £10 and proceeds will be split between For-ethiopia and St Mary Redcliffe charities.

Visit www.for-ethiopia.com for more details.

The Incredible Human Journey

Dr Alice Roberts will be giving an illustrated talk on her BBC series 'The Incredible Human Journey' at St Mary Redcliffe Church on 10 October 2009.

Tickets are £10 and proceeds will be split between For-ethiopia and St Mary Redcliffe charities.

For more details click here.

A Taste for Ethiopia is back

A Taste for Ethiopia on October 17th 2009 is your chance to experience real Ethiopian food and culture in Bristol.

Tickets cost £15 to book please email: event@for-ethiopia.com

The venue is Woodlands, Belgrave Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 2AB.

A night for Coleridge fans!

Our next event is taking place on 18th October 2008 and is a must see for all fans of great literature! Samuel Taylor Coleridge is being brought to life in an evening called 'Table Talk' at St. Mary Redcliffe in Bristol.

Performed by Dennis Harkness, this will be a fascinating evening focusing on the character of this South West poet and philosopher. Known mostly for 'The rime of the ancient mariner' and 'Kubla Khan' he was a real character and the evening will highlight his opium addiction, relationship with women as well as poetry.

Tickets can be obtained by completing the booking form.

Help needed

We really want to get a new website up and running and would like to go for a content management system to enable all the trustees to be able to post to the site and reduce the reliance on a webmaster.

Ideally we want to use a free system such as Joomla! but have no experience in what to use and how to go about setting it up. We would need to port across much of the content from our existing site although once up and running we should be able to manage this ourselves.

So, we are after help! If anyone is into CMS and would be willing to do some work for us free of charge, please get in touch either via our website or add a comment to the blog.

An award of sorts

We have just heard that our sister organisation 'For Ethiopia Association' have been selected as a model NGO (non governmental organisation) by the regional government in Ethiopia.

Based on completing projects on time and under budget, we have been listed with several others to receive a certificate at a presentation attended by Federal and Regional authorities, Ambassadors, etc.

This is a great position to be in as it highlights that despite being small, we are efficient and have successfully achieved a lot with a relatively small budget. It may help to raise our profile and put us in the position to seek funding from Embassies and other international bodies.

The For Ethiopia Association is basically run by Worknesh Daba as a volunteer and guided by the For-ethiopia team in Bristol. While we raise the money, select the projects and chase the progress, it is poor Worknesh who has to do the running around in Ethiopia, appointing contractors, chasing payments, purchasing equipment and dealing with the various Government offices. A big thank you to Worknesh from all in Bristol!

We would also like to thank everyone in the UK and abroad who has donated money towards our projects and hope that this award shows that your money has been well spent.

Art Exhibition

Jacqueline Conradie-Faul, Carrie Hill and Claire Loder will be presenting a show in which they celebrate the 3 different art forms of painting, sculpture and printmaking.

The exhibition is open from Saturday 14 - Friday 20 June, 11am - 5pm at Widcombe Studios Art Gallery in Bath. You can print an invite here.

Jacqueline Conradie-Faul has helped For-Ethiopia , advising on and creating a range of art-related projects. 3 will be another opportunity for Jacqueline to contribute to the amazing work that For-Ethiopia is involved with. 20% of all Jacqueline’s sales will be donated to For-Ethiopia.

WANTED: Joomla programmer

We are desperate to get a new web site up and running and have settled on the open source Joomla! as a content management system, however we have been unable so far to develop our own template.

Although the installation on the server of Joomla! has been relatively straightforward, unless we use the default templates we have been unable to progress with transferring everything from the old html based site.

If anyone with a bit of Joomla! experience would like to offer a bit of time to a voluntary organisation please get in touch, either through this blog or via our For-ethiopia website.

Your assistance would be much appreciated and we would be happy for you to place an advert or use us as a reference in the future.

Heres hoping that all Joomla! professionals read blogs...

Bradgate Raffle

The Bradgate-Addis Alem link are holding a raffle for a lovely hand stitched baby bedspread/blanket. Tickets are available from the Trustees or by emailing us. Tickets are 50p each or 3 for a pound(£) and the draw is taking place on 20 March 2008.

Our Facebook site is starting to take off and we now have 30 fans! I have also linked through to our YouTube video site and now a Flickr site where we are going to be housing our photos. I am also trying to work out how I can integrate Flickr into our website but this is a bit more complicated than it appeared and involves integrating PHP!!!! (any PHP wizards out there want to offer a hand?)

Presentation to the Lions

Last night I gave my presentation to the Keynsham Lions at the Fry Club which seemed to go down well. They were a nice bunch of people and asked a lot of questions, so either they weren't listening or they were genuinely interested!

Surprisingly, I quite like Vista and Office 2007 which seemed to talk very easily to the projector without any problems. Much better than the old version which I always had difficulty with!

We seem to be getting a few more hits on our YouTube site although Facebook hasn't taken off!

Publicity....

As well as our recent attempt of 'viral advertising' via YouTube, Facebook and this blog, we still continue to do the conventional method of attending meetings in person!

On Monday 28th January, Rob will be visiting the Keynsham Lions at the Fry Club for an after-dinner talk. He will be talking about how and why the charity was set up as well as what we have done.

On Thursday 7th February, John and Tigist will be attending the AGM of CLinC at Cromhall village hall to talk about the charity. Roy Greenhalgh had attended our AGM and was very interested in what we were doing. He had previously been on the same course as Tigist which is where he got to know us.

Last bit of news is that Sue is organising a raffle for a lovely hand sewn quilt made by Lisa Hamblin at Bradgate Surgery. Tickets will be 50p each or 3 for £1 and can be bought from Sue or via the For-ethiopia website soon.

Online updates

As well as our website, For-ethiopia now has a Facebook and a YouTube page. At the YouTube page we will try and keep adding videos of events and projects. Currently there are two videos on there so take a look...


The Facebook is a bit different. I signed up as an organisation and now cannot find out how to invite people to look at it. You don't seem to be able to have friends and the way to notify people is a mass mailing to Facebook users. Now, I don't really like receiving mass mailing myself so I really do not want to go down this route! If anyone knows how to invite people please let me know!!!!! Ideally I want people to add it and then their friends see it, visit and add if they like it....at the moment there are a few general photos of Addis Alem on there but I will add more. I cannot put the link to it as I am blogging from work and they have banned access to Facebook!!!!!


Almost forgot, we now have a Buy.At site which means people can search for shops and products and anything they purchase using the site will pass on a commission to go towards our projects!


Oh well, more soon.

Ethiopian Christmas Party

We held a party on Saturday to celebrate both Ethiopian Christmas and our 3rd year of operation.
Although it was a cold, dark, miserable evening, around 40 people turned up to see our presentation and eat mincepies(!), samosas, and an Ethiopian Flag Christmas cake made by Janet (lots of colouring needed!).
Dudley talked well and explained the projects in Addis Alem that had been completed in 2007 balanced against our funding needs for next year.
A couple of people signed up for regular donations and a lot of donations were made in the collection bucket. All in all, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and the Trustees felt a great sense of achievement by the end of.
2007 (year 3) has been a relatively hard one but the successes lead us forward to year 4 with more big ideas!

Year 3 signed off, 2008 here we come!

Well, I cannot believe it is almost a year since the last post! Year 3 of the charity ended 30th September 2007 and the accounts were signed off within a couple of months (again by Jean) and submitted to the Charities Commission.

The Annual General Meeting was held as a Trustees meeting and we are having an 'Ethiopian Christmas Party' on January 5th 2008 to celebrate both Ethiopian Christmas and Year 3 of the Charity.....

Year 3 included four water projects (wells at Arada, Damu and Cheffe, spring capping at Abademie), equipping of two health posts (Arb Gebaye and Iluaga) and books and furniture for four schools (Addis Alem High, Arb Gebaye, Efa Beri and Ejere schools).

Year 4 will see a spring capping at Kusiye, upgrading of the well at Efa Beri and mains water to the high school. We will also be equipping another two clinics, building a library at the High School and books and furniture to two more junior schools.

More details as always will be on the website at www.for-ethiopia.com

Accounts through with flying colours

The accounts have now been 'Independently Examined' by Jean Douglas. Having expected a large number of negative comments, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that she didn't find any errors and that with a few minor tweaks, my accounting system was more than adequate!

We are now in the process of preparing the accounts in the 'Accruals' format so that we can comply with SORP 2005.

Next step, Annual Report and an AGM.......... http://www.for-ethiopia.com will have the report once published.

Another late update.

A lot has happened since the last post.

For Ethiopia Association in Addis Ababa have reported their end of year and are waiting for the auditors to finish. At the same time they are submitting next year's (06/07) proposal which will include work from the donations of Bristol Grammar School, St Joseph's RC Primary School, Bradgate Surgery, John Humphrys' Kitchen Table Charitable Trust (excuse the punctuation John!) among others. Projects will include two more springs, two new wells, furniture, books and equipment for various schools and clinics in the Addis Alem region.

In Bristol, we have been preparing the accounts for an audit ready for the next AGM (date to be announced).

John has been over to Ethiopia (on a sort of working holiday) and got to see the finished springs as well as the new locations.

Our friend Sean held a preview of his new cafe called Kuvuka which opens on Saturday the 13th December. The cafe will promote issues in Africa and will sell fairtrade coffee. Pop down to see it on Stokes Croft near the centre of Bristol.

Tigist has been involved in campaigning with Oxfam against the unfair deals Starbucks give to the Ethiopian farmers and has got herself on various sites.

Lots more happening, but I will write more when we have a date announced for the AGM...

Not very good at blogging!

I have been awful at this! Since starting a blog, I have been meaning to add to it, but time just flies by......

Since my last post a lot has happened:
Bristol Grammar School have raised over £3000, St Joseph's RC Primary School have raised over £1500......Bradgate surgery held a concert evening and raised £900.

One of our Trustees is about to go out to Ethiopia - along with our volunteer fundraiser Mike Frost - while there they will visit the completed projects as well as look at new projects planned for next year.

The production of christmas cards was a bit of a non-starter.....after getting them designed by Jacqueline Conradie-Faul (www.expanded-vision.com) we had difficulties finding a printer who could produce them at a price we could make a profit. Eventually the quality offered was not up to standard so we have had to cancel cards for this year and will start early to prepare for 2007.

Anyway, I will hopefully keep this up to date from now on.......if not:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!