What are the 5 Crucial Pieces of Advice for Starting Your Own Charity in Asia?
By: Ai Goto
Tags: Charity, Foundation, Nonprofit, Startup, Southeast Asia

In February 2020, I launched my personal project named “CHANGE Education Fund” to support creative educational activities for under-resourced children primarily in Malaysia and also other countries in Southeast Asia.

Starting this project took a lot of thinking, reflecting, and actions for me over the past few years.

I am now truly delighted and grateful that I am able to finally make my ideas into reality, no matter how small it might be in the beginning.

The reason why it took me a long time to start the first few steps was my lack of knowledge and guidance. So, I am here to share my thoughts and experiences so that people with similar interests can be inspired to take action to make a step forward.

I intend for my writing to be beneficial for you if you are:

Interested in charity / nonprofit / grant-making in the field of education in Asia.

Interested in starting your own nonprofit/charity in Asia, but not knowing how.

Curious about what your life might look like once you start your own nonprofit/charity in Asia.

Wanting to find meaningful work that you can devote yourself to.

I will try to be practical, true to the facts, and clear.

Now, let’s move on to today’s topic;

What are the 5 crucial pieces of advice for starting your own charity?

There are the 5 useful pieces of advice that I received from my mentors.

I follow them and I am doing alright so far. Some of it I received from my mentor several years ago, and some of them were mentioned in some meetings last month. I think all of these are very true and useful. So here they are.

1. Starting a charity takes money.

Starting a charity takes money.

This is absolutely true. Charity means you are giving out something. Either cash money, such as donation or grant, or other resources such as time, goods such as food, books, diapers, etc.

One of my mentors, who started a nonprofit based in Ubud, Bali, particularly emphasized out “Yes, starting something like my venture needs money.”

Of course, the vision and mission of your activity must to be nicely framed, but that alone cannot run activities and programs. You need to face this reality from the very beginning so that you can develop a practical financial plan to make your programs sustainable.

2. You should put your own money. Otherwise, you cannot generate trust.

At first, I thought people starting a nonprofit begin with fundraising. However, my mentor said “Put your own money first”.

What I think is quite interesting is the latter part: “Otherwise, you cannot generate trust”.

People will see that you are putting your own money for charitable activities and think “Oh this person is serious, she/he is putting her/his own money”.

Similarly, my mentor also continued “Don’t receive salary from your charity (at least in the starting phase)”.

This means you need your own system to sustain your livelihood as well.

3. If you seek advice, ask those who are a) already doing it, and b) successful.

Seek for advice from people who are successfully doing what you want to do.

This seems very self-evident, but I noticed that some people seek advice to people who a) haven’t done it by him/herself, or b)haven’t been successful.

Obviously, the advice from such people would not be useful as they have not experienced it themselves.

I myself asked for advice from a few people I know, all of them who are in the field, have some experience, and are successful even at different levels.

If you are wondering where you can get good advice, think of people who are doing it and are successful. If you cannot think of anyone, try looking for one through the internet and network.

4. Make it come to life on a VERY small scale, within three months from now.

If you are not sure what to do and how to do, just actually putting it into reality can make you realize many things.

You will see whether you really wanted to do it, or you just liked the idea of doing it. These two are definitely two different things and will affect your motivation for your charity, so putting your plan into reality will make you realize how you truly feel. So it’s better to put it in action and see what comes next.

5. Share your thoughts and actions by writing a blog. (Or Medium posts!)

Writing and sharing your thoughts, stories and efforts behind the scenes will attract attention from those who are interested in the field. Your “inside out” can inspire others, which will in turn inspire you back.

This one is just being experimented! This is why I started posting on Medium!