Welcome to the 2019 Fundraiser: Worldbuilders + Bangladesh

How it works…

Welcome to the 2019 Worldbuilders Fundraiser! This year we’re going to try something ambitious: we want to give Heifer International a massive head start on one of their upcoming projects! Based on a successful previous project, Heifer’s Inclusive Markets for Women Farmers in Bangladesh will do exactly what the title suggests. It will give women in Bangladesh the education, organizational skills, and the materials and training they need to provide for their families, start women’s co-operatives in their communities, set up their own successful businesses, and build the infrastructure needed for small farmers to establish, organize, and participate in local markets.

Traditionally, even though Bangladeshi women do all of the house work and most of the farming, they do not have the same social status as men. Heifer’s program will empower women to become not just providers for their families, but successful and important members of their communities. And their daughters will have the opportunity to go to school – an opportunity most girls don’t get.

Hasina Begum, 27, helps her daughter Shopna Khatun, 10, do her homework. Khatun is the face of our fundraiser this year! Photo by Heifer International.

Since 2008, Worldbuilders has raised over $9.6 million for Heifer International and other humanitarian efforts. Our supporters often ask which programs we’re supporting, and we are thrilled to be able to get in on the ground floor for a specific upcoming program. We’re also very excited to share the story of Shopna Khatun, who is featured in our fundraiser banner and pictured above with her mother. We’ll tell you about her in the next few days, so stay tuned!

Donate as little as $10 on our fundraising page for a chance to win fabulous prizes like books, games, and more. If you donate $30 (enough for honeybees!), you get three chances to win. You can see all the prizes in our Lottery Library, all donated by our sponsors, awesome authors, game-designers, artists, creators, and more – and any of those prizes could be yours!

And if you’d rather not leave prizes up to chance, we will launch nearly 100 auctions on Thursday, December 5th at our eBay page, full of rare, unique, and one-of-a-kind items – so make sure you follow that link Thursday evening when they launch! All the money raised from these auctions gets rolled up into the total we send to Heifer International, meaning you get to effectively pick your own prize and still help do good in the world.

Why it works…

This fundraiser is all about one of our favorite charities, Heifer International. 100% of the money we raise during the fundraiser goes right to Heifer, to help with the upcoming women’s empowerment program in Bangladesh we mentioned above. Heifer has invested a lot of work during their 75 years in the life-changing game, and their programs are smart, practical, and they work.

Heifer doesn’t just go in and give a family food for a year, because after that year, the family would still be in the same position they were before. Heifer gives a family training, knowledge, and resources, and then provides them the tools to build their own success. Sometimes it’s vegetable seeds, sometimes it’s chickens or a goat, sometimes it’s the means to start a business – but no matter what, Heifer International makes sure the family is empowered to pull themselves out of poverty. Each program continues until it reaches the goals laid out early on, and most times, the participant families go on to achieve even more success after a program has finished, thanks to the skills learned from Heifer.

People like Chasha Veronica, whose one of the many runaway successes in Heifer’s long history of helping people get on their feet, stay there, and help the next person up. And it’s no secret that, here at Worldbuilders, the goat is one of our favorite Heifer gifts (we were happy to learn goats are popular in Bangladesh).

If you want to hear more stories like Chasha’s, we’ll have updates right here in our blog that contain the stories of participants from similar Heifer programs, including the previous iteration of the program we are supporting, so you can see exactly how the program will pull people out of poverty. We will also feature lottery and auction highlights, and more information on Heifer’s other smart, sustainable programs.

Each time we hit a milestone where we have raised enough money to fund the next stage of the Inclusive Markets for Women Farmers program, we will let you know how far into the program your donations have reached, and how much good Heifer will be doing just on what we’ve raised.

So please join us! Donate, get your name in the lottery, check out our auctions when they post Thursday evening at 7pm CST, and let’s start building a better world!