Thanks to everyone who donated, we successfully brought a van& contents to Mongolia.

Any further donations willbe put to good use!

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This summer we are going to help charities who work in the areas of children's healthcare and education in Mongolia.  Can you help us crowd fund our 10,000km charity fundraising, permaculture, GIYing, fact-finding, resilience searching, vegetable adventure Ireland to Mongolia?

Why Mongolia?

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Mongolia lost Russian aid and has experienced rapid changes to its economy and society.  Big mining interests and other changes have made an impact, and one result has been people moving to shanty towns. This has brought poverty, poor health, family breakdowns and high mortality. Many children are left orphaned or alone during the day, with little to eat. 

And for us, it' a place of great interest and adventure to visit.

Who You Are Helping

The main charity we have chosen is GoHelp, which in turn helps other charities and organisations in Mongolia. These have projects focused on street children, orphanages and children with disablities. They work to address health, education and poor nutrition.  

What kind of help is given?

Because Mongolia is such a vast country, one key to helping these children is to make access to care possible.  This means having good quality rugged and emergency vehicles. So GoHelp have worked with Mongolian authorities to get free or low import taxes on these vehicles.  Once in Mongolia, GoHelp match the vehicles to local needs in their own and other NGO projects. Occasionally they sell a vehicle and use the cash to fund a project. 

What exactly will we be doing?

Our family is one of the teams in the Mongolian Charity Rally, a fundraising event which GoHelp have run a number of years (they've got experience with all the logistics of the trip, the borders, and ensuring the charities on the ground benefit from our work and the money and vehicle we bring).  So we'll be driving a vehicle from Ireland to Mongolia, where it will be used to benefit children's charities and NGOs there.

Along the way, we will:

• visit & help on permaculture and community and school garden projects
• look for examples of re-localization & sustainable farming
• talk to people overcoming challenges in finding ways to make a local livelihood
• visit Dnepropetrovsk (where Mike's ancestors are from -- he's brushing up on his Russian now!)
• record stories from the people we meet for a travel vlog and documentary
• bring appropriate heritage and open pollinated seeds from Irish seed organizations to the vegetable growing projects as donations
• do some seed swaps and bring some back
• visit the wild apple forests (where all Apple trees originally came from!) in Almaty, Kazakhstan

What will we bring back?

Apart from videos of the people and projects we visit, when we're back we hope to share what we learned, what we were inspired by, and possibly offer a new perspective on surviving real austerity, for use in our training projects in Carraig Dúlra.  

We think these will be especially helpful in our work with unemployed people in Ireland, that has been our focus for the last few years.