Friendly Water for the World August newsletter

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Subject: Friendly Water for the World August newsletter

Welcome to the August issue of News and Notes. All of us at Friendly Water for the World hope this email finds you well and enjoying the summer weather (or winter if you're reading from the Southern Hemisphere). This month we share stories about:

Building schools
Rocket stoves
Our 10-year anniversary
Moving day
Gifting stock
Nalanda Academy Chat invitation

We hope you enjoy the updates. If you have any suggestions on how to improve our monthly newsletter, submissions for content, or ideas for articles to include, please contact will@friendlywater.org.

PROJECT UPDATES

The walls are up in Mungolo.

Last month we shared the big news that the Monze, Zambia Department of Education had approved Friendly Water for the World Interlocking Soil Stabilized Bricks for the building of schools in the greater Monze area. This month we get to see the great progress the first school in Mungolo is making.

As a reminder, this school replaced one that had crumbled to the ground. For more than a year the local students had been meeting under a large tree. This new school, built by the Zambia Women and Girls Foundation in partnership with the Friends of Monze, includes three classrooms, two offices, and two storerooms to teach 300 students.

As you can tell, the walls are well on their way to being finished. And at a minimum savings of $1,431 USD. The interlocking function of the bricks eliminated 200 bags of 50Kg cement. And each bag costs a little more than 130 Zambian kwacha or $7.30 USD.

Not only is there a direct monetary benefit, but the environment and climate benefit too. Trees do not have to be cut down to fire the bricks. We are still figuring out how many trees survive, but we know that a large kiln used for another school in the area required 10 fires to burn traditional bricks. That's a lot of charcoal and firewood.

In addition to the sturdy new walls, we have drafted a new quarterly plan with our Coach, Warren Mwenda, to expand our work in Monze. That plan includes making bricks for four new schools, additional BioSand Water Filters and training, and two new water catchments. All this work will be guided by Warren and completed by the local community and those we trained in February. Each new brick, catchment, and filter will build knowledge, expertise, and resilience.

And that is just the start. This school in Mungolo is just one of 30 new schools that need to be built in the Monze area. That's potentially 300 fewer brick-fires and a whole lot of interlocking soil stabilized bricks.

A CELEBRATION

Happy anniversary to you!

10 years ago Del Livingston, David Albert, and an enthusiastic group of supporters joined together to start Friendly Water for the World. What a 10 years it has been. Join us at a special online event later this year to celebrate our, and your anniversary. And if you'd like to volunteer to be part of our event, send me an email - will@friendlywater.org.

ROCKET STOVES

Not just water.

Friendly Water for the World is a water-first organization. We have worked with dozens of communities around the world and have found every time that having clean, safe water is the first step we can take to improving the lives of people and communities. But it isn't the only step.

Being water-first means we are also health-first. And there are few better ways to improve the health of the community, especially for women and children, than by using a rocket stove for safe cooking. It turns out that not only does boiling water save lives, but so does how you boil the water.

3 billion people around the world depend on food cooked on open fires. The health consequences are frequently deadly. 4 million people die from (usually) pulmonary-type illnesses every year. Cooks, usually women, suffer from eye irritation, scarring, and blindness. And tragically, children are often burned as they play and accidentally fall against or into these open fires. The health of the planet also suffers. Wood fuel is typically harvested from unsustainable sources leading to forest degradation, soil erosion, and a decline in biodiversity. And inefficient cooking fires emit significant climate-warming pollutants like methane, carbon dioxide, and black carbon.

That's where the benefits of the rocket stove shine. A rocket stove is a kind of super-efficient small combustion stove that is usually easy to build and operate. Its components are simple:

Fuel shelf
Magazine
Combustion chamber
Chimney

The stove works like most by burning fuel. But in this case you only need small diameter fuel that is easy to collect. The fuel is inserted into the magazine which blocks the air intake around it. Air current is then pulled in under the fuel and thanks to turbulence through the chimney, burns only at the tip. The small combustion chamber and relative high-temperature burn consume the fuel and pollutants, leaving mostly clean air to heat the cooking vessel on top.

We have been building and testing our own rocket stoves, attempting to identify a flexible design that could work best with the resources available in our partner communities. Some communities may want a stove that generates more heat, others that heat faster or burn fuel longer. We are also exploring building stoves that have different surfaces like a plate to make various kinds of unleavened bread.

This Patsari Cookstsove is a version of a stove that has been used to cook tortillas (including other food) in Mexico and Central America for 30 years.

If you have any experience developing these technologies or know of someone who may be able to share their relevant expertise or ideas, please connect with us. We hope that these new stoves bring people together in their homes as cooking does in yours.

MOVING DAY

Greetings from our first Africa office!

Our work in Africa, especially East Africa, continues to grow. So the time was right to open our first office located within Kakamega County in the Western Region of Kenya. The office rental space will be used primarily by Eric Lijodi, our Africa Programs Manager.

The paint is still drying and we don't have signs up yet, but the new office is already giving Friendly Water for the World a more official local presence. It will especially help us meet privately with local partners, improve our service delivery, and ensure a safe environment during the coronavirus pandemic. More than anything it demonstrates a new strategic imperative for deeper investment into our long-term community partnerships.

And changes to our home in Olympia.

As the benefits of opening a new office in Kakamega became more apparent, so did the benefits of opening a new digital headquarters. We are a global organization and the pandemic has both reduced the utilization of our office in Olympia and demonstrated how effectively we can connect with all of our constituents in a digital environment. So, we are currently shifting our staff and office operations to a primarily digital environment. This will both save our monthly rent and office expenses and help enable us to grow beyond the confines of our physical environment. Our new physical mailing address is:

900 Jefferson St

Unit 6070

Olympia WA 98501

Anything you may have just sent will be forwarded to this address. And we are still available to meet, connect, and share our work, within the safety guidelines of the current public health environment.

MONTHLY BOARD MEETING

The Friendly Water for the World board meeting is open to the public.

On Tuesday, August 11th at 4:30pm, we will be hosting our next meeting online again with a Zoom call. We want everyone to have the opportunity to participate, especially now when most of us are physically distancing at home. To join us, click the button below to register. After registering you'll be sent an email with a link to the meeting.

If you are located in the United States and would like to join an audio-only version of the call from your telephone, dial the number below that is closest to your location and enter the Meeting ID: 551-730-873.

San Jose +1 669 900 9128
New York +1 646 558 8656

If you have any difficulties joining, please contact will@friendlywater.org.

ATTEND THE BOARD MEETING

CHARITABLE GIVING

How can you make a lasting impact?

Every month we have included a section in this newsletter about how you can make your donations go further and make a lasting impact by giving in different ways. Our details have been a little light on how to do that, and the benefits it can have for you. So, we are going to start sharing timely and hopefully more useful information on topics like estate planning, donor-advised funds, and asset gifting.

This month we start with an article about gifting stock written by our new special contributor, Tom McLean. Tom is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER^TM in Olympia, founder of Advitica Financial Planning, and will be writing about charitable giving techniques that may create new tax and financial planning opportunities. In this issue, he'll describe why if you own shares of stock, this might be a great time to gift some to your favorite nonprofit (we hope that's us!).

And please keep in mind that Friendly Water for the World is part of matching gift programs at Microsoft, Kaiser Permanente, Google, Boeing, and others. If you have an employer that has a matching gift program, please help us become part of their system.

Now, on to Tom's article.

Save Taxes by Gifting Stock

2020 has been a year of crisis. Across the world, communities are confronting tremendous challenges related to the coronavirus and its economic impact. But a time of acute suffering and stress for so many also creates an opportunity for us to help in new and creative ways.

The most common gift charitable organizations receive is cash. While organizations need cash, there are other, potentially more tax-efficient methods for donors to make gifts. One example is to give appreciated stock (stock that has increased in value).

Today, with many stocks having recovered from their March lows, it is an especially interesting time to consider gifting stock (or stock mutual funds). There is a double benefit: you get to deduct the gift (if over the standard deduction amount), and your capital gains tax liability disappears!

Additionally, for those over 70.5 who have been making gifts from their IRAs to satisfy required minimum distributions (RMDs), the CARES Act passed in March this year waived RMDs. This nullified the tax benefit of making these gifts for 2020. Lastly, with the economy in a precarious position, stock markets may see renewed volatility before the end of the year. Making gifts now while valuations are strong could be a smart move.

2020 is an important year to consider gifting stock. With tax deductibility, capital gains tax savings, and the waiver of IRA RMDs, giving stock is more important than before. Additionally, by making a gift of stock you may create significant space to turn taxable IRA withdrawals into tax-free Roth IRA withdrawals (we will discuss in a future newsletter). While making stock gifts has its advantages, before implementing this strategy it is imperative to discuss this with your tax advisor or CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional to make sure it is the right solution for you.

For more information about gifting stock, you may contact Tom at tom@adviticafp.com or our Finance Manager, Heather Avery at heather@friendlywater.org.

ONE LAST THING

A new program with Nalanda Academy.

We are starting to shared details about our new water-first resilience building and social emancipation program under development between two knowledge-sharing organizations, Nalanda Academy of Wardha, India, and Friendly Water for the World. Nalanda Academy is an Education Resource Centre based at a Buddha Vihar in Wardha, Maharashtra that annually prepares 250 marginalized students to pursue quality higher education. This program will be an opportunity for us to share our platform of life-improving basic technologies to help lift Dalit, tribal and other marginalized students and communities out of the cycles of poverty, poor health, and prejudice.

To learn more, join us for a Chat. On the last Friday of each month at noon, we host an online Zoom video conferencing Chat. The Chat is open to everyone and we encourage anyone who wants to participate to share their thoughts and ideas. It's a great way to stay connected in these difficult times, especially with people from around the world - we often get Chatters from eight or nine countries.

Our next Chat will introduce Nalanda Academy, the inspiring people who lead it, the program and objectives, and the city of Wardha located in the heart of India.

You can watch any of our previous Chats and register for any of our other upcoming events on our website Events page here:

https://friendlywater.org/Events

Until our next Chat, our next newsletter, or whenever we are fortunate enough to see each other again. Please be safe and kind to others.

-Will, and the rest of our small but global team

JOIN THE CHAT

FRIENDLY WATER FOR THE WORLD

https://friendlywater.org

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Subject: Friendly Water for the World August newsletter