Megobari Foundation Activities September 2016 August 2017

Megobari Foundation Activities September 2016 – August 2017

We had three board meetings in the year and two new members were invited to join our board:

• Sara Lafe, who was a volunteer in Georgia from 2001-2003, the first years of Peace Corps’ presence in Georgia. Sara has strong connections to RPCVs in Washington DC and greater technical skills than many older board members and has extensive experience in non-profits.
• Ruta Casabianca, a PCV in Georgia from 2010-2013. After her service, she started Together for Real Change, a non-profit to help children with disabilities in Georgia. Together for Real Change has proven very successful and now operates in a numberof towns in Georgia.

We are considering extending our activities to include donating to projects in Georgia that are not under the auspices of Peace Corps. In particular, Ruta Casabianca, who has recently joined the board, is working to provide community services for disabled children. We are planning a fund raiser for her projects in the fall.

An addition to our income came in the form of Amazon Smile donations. We encouraged members and friends to nominate the Megobari Foundation as their charity of choice for this funding mechanism.We do not know how many elected to do so, but this mechanism did provide nearly a quarter of our income.

During the year, we were able to make donations supporting two PCPP projects in Georgia:

Clair Beatley’s project:National English Spelling Competition - Georgia (NESC-GE)

Donnie Turner’s project:Give to Georgia | New Cabinet, New Possibilities.

Since most of our members and interested parties are younger, we created a Facebook page for all RPCVs Georgia. Later we extended the group to include all former Peace Corps Georgia employees and volunteers who had served at least one year in Georgia. Any group member may post on this page which is intended as an information, updating and networking tool and posts include information about development in Georgia, meetings of RPCVs, cultural activities, etc. We continue to post and update the Megobari Facebook which is open to all. We are considering taking down the Megobari website since its functions can be covered by the Facebook pages.

We continue to work closely with American Friends of Georgia to encourage younger people to be active in the philanthropic community.In doing this we have formed relationships with other Peace Corps groups in Washington, Madison and shortly in the general NYC Peace Corps Community.

We have hosted Peace Corps Georgia staff members, helped them to explore New York and arranged reunions of RPCVs with these staff.This helps us understand how Peace Corps Georgia is developing and the needs of the present volunteers and how they use technology.

We have planned a return trip to Georgia for those volunteers who were evacuated in 2008 and so much appreciated the Georgian staff at that time.