Burma Relief Launches $13,000 Fundraising Campaign on Crowdfunding Site HelpersUnite.com; Funds Provide a Home, Education for Burmese Refugee Children
New York-based Burma Relief launches $13,000 fundraising campaign through crowdfunding site, HelpersUnite, to complete construction of a boys’ dormitory for 50 Burmese refugee children.
New York, NY, October 11, 2011 --(PR.com)-- Burma is the forgotten country: one of the poorest nations in Southeast Asia and ranked next to last in international aid received. Furthermore, Burma is home to forced labor, human trafficking and child labor from which children and families often flee to bordering Maesot, Thailand, where new perils await.
New York-based Burma Relief meets these children and families at the Maesot border, offering housing, food, medical treatment and education for children. Led by Executive Director Jeremy Taylor, the organization has helped over a thousand Burmese children living in Maesot: it has provided malaria testing and treatment for 800 Burmese, life saving heart operations for 4 Burmese children and three months of rice for 450 children. It recently built a dormitory with bunk beds for 50 orphaned Burmese refugee girls at the New Blood Migrant School in Maesot. Burma Relief’s next project is to construct a new 3,000 square-foot dormitory building.
After a successful gala event last month, Taylor raised $7,000 for this building, $13,000 short of his $20,000 goal. Taylor has now launched a campaign on HelpersUnite.com to raise the remaining funding, with 100% of all capital received going towards completing its construction and the necessary bunk beds, electricity, computers and housing for English teachers. In exchange for donations, the organization is offering personal thank you notes, t-shirts and DVDs of the documentary that served as Taylor’s call to action.
Taylor founded Burma Relief soon after filming his documentary, “Burma: An Indictment,” morphing his project into a movement for these children. “Learning of the humanitarian crisis while making our documentary was the epiphany it took for me to create this organization dedicated to orphaned Burmese refugee children,” says Taylor.
GoodWorldCreations was founded in early 2011 and specializes in leveraging complex, state-of-the art web and social technology to help make the world a better place. Its flagship platform, HelpersUnite.com, is the first-ever platform to combine fundraising for creative and business ventures with charitable giving and online event ticketing.
For more information, visit www.HelpersUnite.com.
![Burma Monks [Photo by Steve Latimer]](/images/stories/library/photos/burma-monks-1.jpg "Burma Monks [Photo by Steve Latimer]")
Three Buddhist monks gave a chilling account of the brutality inflicted by the military regime during the 2007 Saffron Revolution in Burma which resulted in more than 450 of their fellow monks imprisoned and countless others tortured, killed and exiled.
On October 17th, 2010, The Free Burma Alliance - Amnesty International held its Inaugural NYC all-day conference (co-organized by Network 355), at the Liederkranz Foundation, a beautiful space on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The event lived up to its billing, “Raising Burma Awareness,” drawing nearly 100 attendees to the hall.