15th September 2007 NEWS RELEASE

SCHOOLS RAISE FUNDS
St Lukes Church of England School in Kingston continued its support for Thatu and Lotus Gardens School in South Africa with a further £150 raised by sales. And Sun Hill Infant School in Hampshire sent Thatu £190 from their sale.

OUR INSURANCE FRIEND AWAC
AWAC [Allied World Assurance Company Ltd] have proved to be very good friends of Thatu by giving us a donation for the third year, this time for £1,000. We appreciate their faith that by giving to Thatu the money is being well spent. More later.

WORD ON THATU’s work SPREADS FAR AND WIDE
Our donors are learning about us and our work not only through our website and personal contacts, but by means which sometimes to us are quite mysterious. Someone unknown to us in Australia recommended Thatu to a friend in the UK, someone in a legal firm in South Africa recommended Thatu to another UK resident.

We were made the official charity for the UK event for Miss Southern Africa on August 26th. Whilst funds for us from this have not flowed in, we have hopes of gaining from the positive publicity

FUNDRAISING INGENUITY CONTINUES
Our contributions continue to come in innovative ways. A Canadian gave us old Irish pounds she found from an earlier trip. We sent them to a friend in Ireland to change at the Bank of Ireland, and in time we received Euros back. A Trustee then used these for a trip to Europe, reimbursing Thatu with the equivalent in sterling.

Two of the Trustees, Susan Law and Catherine McGarey held their annual Jabula [garden party] in Susan’s garden, luckily on a dry day. As news of this event in Kent grows so does the support. And Susan’s regular walking group donated their charity walk to Thatu.

Volunteers ran Thatu stalls at four South London fetes and fairs in the summer, again luckily on some of the dry days in May and June. We were able to include South African products [bead work and material bags and dolls] for sale. They were made by Ikamva’s sheltered workshop Community Creations in Cape Town, and were brought to us by travellers from South Africa. We hope to build up these if we can find people prepared to bring in small quantities in order that we avoid huge transport costs.

Contributions for our Pennypinchers Campaign continue. Collecting larger amounts of small change takes time, but the numbers of people collecting grow steadily.

BOOKCROSSERS AND OUR STAMP APPEAL
We continue to get thick envelopes and sometimes boxes of stamps from all over the world, mainly sent by Bookcrossers who are responding to the Thatu appeal [see How you can help] on their website [www.bookcrossers.com] . Some have even sent us treasured stamp albums. If you don’t know anything about bookcrossing and bookcrossers do look, and perhaps join in. They seem to be an amazing bunch of people, and are proving to be wonderful friends of Thatu..

ECOHOUSE EVENT
As we write Thatu is about to benefit from an evening in Will Anderson’s ecohouse. Will has become a very generous Thatu supporter, giving of his time, and now access to his lovely house. Thatu also benefited from the £50 thankyou the Clapham Society gave him when he addressed one of their meetings. To read more about the history of the house see www.treehouseclapham.org.uk and read Will’s book ‘Diary of an eco-builder.’ News of the event later, as also of Will’s next book ‘Green up! An A-Z of Environmentally-friendly home improvements’ due out at the end of the September. Both books published by Green Books.

THATU TRUSTEES VISIT TO SOUTH AFRICA
In March Susan Law and Margery Povall went on a private visit to South Africa, which centred around viewing our current projects and talking to participants[see reports on each under projects …]. They also fitted in visits to the Fort and Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, and to penguins. Susan learned how to shake hands African style And they learned to eat bunnychow, if somewhat messily.

They took the opportunity to spend time with other projects and organisations in the Cape Flats and Gauteng that we had had good reports on. Susan, whose first visit this was to south Africa commented ‘We were so inspired by the people [often women] we met, who were working against the odds to improve communities. We now have to make the difficult decisions as to how available funds should be allocated. The problem is that they are all needy, all innovative and all need help to become or remain sustainable. Difficult decisions have to be made soon by the Trustees to ensure our donors’ money is wisely spent'.