Abdul Sattar Edhi is a living legend and the most decorated philanthropist of Pakistan truly for his unmatched dedication, commitment and practical work. He runs the world’s largest volunteer ambulance network along with various homeless shelters, animal shelters, rehabilitation centres and orphanages across Pakistan. After Edhi’s death, his son Faisal Edhi took over as head of the Edhi Foundation.
At his early age, his mother died but Edhi rose to the occasion and converted his early age suffering into an ever-growing ambition to strive for charitable work. As Allama Iqbal puts it in a subtle manner:
Ye faizan-e-nazar that kay maktab ki karamat thi
Skikahyey kis nay Ismail ko aadab-e-farzandi?
The EDHI foundation provides 24-hours emergency across the nation of Pakistan and abroad. The foundation provides many other services like a shelter for the destitute, free hospitals and medical care, drug rehabilitation services, national and international relief efforts
So, actually, the purpose of writing this blog is that we were assigned a task by Amal Academy to collect and raise funds for EDHI Foundation. So, we can learn to get out of our comfort zone and accept failures and then stand up again against obstacles and finding ways to overcome those obstacles.
Here are the few experiences which we observed in our journey of collecting funds.
Experience in collecting funds:
It was a really productive activity. I felt great joy doing whatever I could in my capacity to encourage & convince people to donate to this cause. Furthermore, I came to realize that collecting funds for charity work really gives us some internal peace that can’t be defined.
Working individually and in a group:
We collected funds in both ways.
Firstly we collected funds individually by approaching our family members, friends and teachers who are familiar to us.
But when we had collected funds to a certain extent, we collaborated with another group that was doing the same thing. And this collaboration helped us a lot as we got to know their mistakes and strategies and we applied their strategies in our work to collect more funds and they learned from our failures to not repeat our mistakes in future.
Challenges we faced in collecting funds
Due to the COVID situation, we had to carry out this activity majorly via the different social platforms. We opted for different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter and posted the details for donation as well as conveying to them the need for donations.
It was challenging in a way that when you reach out physically to people for any sort of help people are generally more responsive that way but carrying out such activities virtually usually becomes a hard task as it takes more effort to convince people. Also, people were somewhat reluctant & were hesitant in donating directly to us because Edhi Foundation is a well-known organization and people prefer to donate directly to them instead of donating through a third party.
Strategies to tackle challenges
After all those failures, we decided to develop strategies to collect more funds. We first decided to call the person rather than just messaging and try to convince the person in the live call. Second we decided to stand outside the Masjid with donation box in our hand. Third, we went out in the street to collect funds from the persons passing by. And these strategies helped us a lot in collecting funds.
Here is the photo which we have taken during our journey of collecting funds.
Accepting failure to grow further
We got many rejections. We text 100 people of which only 5 gave us a donation. But one thing we learnt from failure is that it pushes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to work even harder than before.
As said by Robert F. Kennedy;
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
This experience taught us that don’t be disappoint. There are many opportunities for you and your success starts from where you accept your failure because success doesn’t give experiences, your failure gives you experiences.
