Stinson Air & Solar Fundraise for Hope 2019
Posted on 30 May 2019
An Open Letter from Brad Stinson
My name is Brad Stinson, I am the Managing Director of Stinson Air & Solar and I am hoping you can help, as we are embarking on something quite special – our team with a handful of other Perth small business owners/individuals are building schools in South East Asia. Our group is again partnering with “Classroom of Hope” to ensure that this will become a reality like we did last year. Our group’s target is to build a minimum of 1 new school in the neediest remote communities in South East Asia per year. Last year was our first year and we were very successful in building one new school in remote Cambodia and also half funding the completion of another as well as just recently funding a “pop up” school in Lombok to help with last year’s earthquake disaster relief where over 400 schools were flattened. We captured some of the highlights in our blog and video , please check it out, we think the video is pretty cool!
We are raising funds until the end of September. We will then commence construction immediately and will have the school built by early 2020. Some of us including my sister Tracy and our Dad flew up earlier this year (at our own costs) for the opening ceremonies which were an experience of a lifetime at the two new schools in Cambodia’s Northern regions, being; Keo PichPrimary School (Siem Reap Province) and Ou Sralao Lech Primary School (Battambang Province). We just couldn’t wait to venture out to see the progress. It’s hard to imagine the impact of supporting such a worthy cause until you see it first-hand, which is why it was such an honour to attend the openings. We all have different reasons for doing these projects, but I wanted to quickly take you back and share my reasons for getting involved at the start of this journey.
My wife and I had on our “life to do list,” to take our 3 young kids in 2021 to a third world country to help “build a village” or similar, I wanted to do this to make a difference but it was also important to me to show my kids “the other side” from a blessed Aussie kids life. I soon after evolved my idea to the desire to “solar power” a village or similar and to get our business involved, seeing as that we are involved in the exciting rooftop solar industry.
We started researching options and speaking with people. When a good mate asked us to get involved with the amazing organisation “Classroom of Hope” to build a school I was very curious. I first did a lot of due diligence into Classroom of Hope and even met their founder Duncan Ward, I was very impressed with their reasons and passion for improving education to Cambodia and their low overheard “charity business model” – over 85% of money donated goes to the recipients and they are building this towards a 100% model with their amazing “Wise Owls” program. Please learn more at www.classroomofhope.org for the amazing story of why and how the charity is operating.
My next question before committing was, “can we solar power this school” I was excited by the answer! One of the main reasons that first got us excited about being involved in this project was the fact that the schools we build are a sustainable model so that they can still be operating for many years to come. An example of this is building schools with a solar plant and battery charging station as well as a fresh filtered drinking water supply. The solar power is used to charge basic car batteries that the local kids can take home to their local village to help with power for basic cooking and lighting. In return for this and access to clean drinking water the families can pay a small fee back to the school and hey presto, the school can keep operating well into the future.
Back to today.. This is exciting, the average school we are building will educate over 200 children per year, so with this sustainable model, we will be able to say that in 20 years we have helped to supply education to over 4000 needy children – for every school that we build!
We hope you can help us with our exciting life-changing project. We are hoping you can make a donation and help us make a difference. Any donation small or large would be greatly appreciated.
Once again to learn more about how this project will come together and why we are getting involved please learn more at www.classroomofhope.org.
Thank you sincerely again,
Brad Stinson, my family, Classroom of Hope and all the team at Stinson Air & Solar.
A Big Thank You To Our Sponsors
We were simply blown away by the overwhelming level of support from our fundraising campaign last year, and we cannot thank all of our partners and sponsors enough for getting behind the fantastic Classroom of Hope charity. We would like to acknowledge the following companies for helping us make such a profound difference to these remote communities in 2019.
Want To Get Involved?
Link to donate is https://funds4coh.everydayhero.com/au/stinson-air-1 .
If you would like to learn more or are interested in joining us for this worthy cause, we welcome you to contact us. We might even see you on the trip with us next year!
Brad Stinson
Managing Director | Stinson Air and Solar Solutions