Project Selection

How does the Christadelphian Meal a Day Fund of the Americas select a project to support?

  1. NOTHING happens without you…your prayers, your encouragement, your advice and your financial help. Please also encourage others to join Meal a Day in “doing good works in the name of Jesus”.
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    This is a wonderful professiona couple who lead projects for CMaDFA. He is an engineer who helps communities with water and electricity projects. She is a counselor who serves poor families and children on a volunteer basis
  2. First we need to find the right people to work with…none of us is going to move to Latin America or the Caribbean to run a project. We wouldn’t have the contacts and skills necessary to accomplish most of these good works. We find these people by using the contacts already developed by the Meal a Day Brethren from the UK. These are people who have successfully completed projects…they have a history of on-time and on-budget success. Virtually every person we are working with is personally known to a Christadelphian who has lived and worked in South America, or was recommended to us by one of these “first generation” contacts. As we meet and work with these “second generation” contacts, we learn whether we can rely on their recommendations of “third generation” contacts, and so on.
  3. Prior to our meeting on October 18, 2008, we had identified 35 projects that needed funding. Many of these were technical in nature…electrification, water purification or equipment-related. We are blessed to have the good counsel of a Brother in Christ who is a PhD engineer and who has lived and worked in South America over the past years. He reviewed each proposal—particularly the technical ones—and gave us his advice on how appropriate, how sound, and how economical each one was. He expressed his opinion regarding their relative priority, also.
  4. Twenty-eight projects were ready to go forward, upon receipt of our funding. These requests totaled well over twice the funding we had available.
  5. Many of these potential partners had invested many hours corresponding with us, meeting with us, preparing their proposals and documenting them according to our requirements. Where possible, we needed to fund at least their best proposal (some submitted as many as 5 different proposals).
  6. We had to honor the prior commitments made by our sister organization, Meal a Day of the UK. We found that this was a pleasure; the 3 projects they passed to us are worthy of our first attention.
  7. We wanted to follow the UK committee’s practice of funding about half “one-time” projects, and the other half “ongoing” projects.
  8. Whereever possible, we would like to support projects with the potential to benefit the communities where Brethren live. This is still in its infancy.
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    Two Bruces, Bruce Parker meeting with Bruce Thornton of "BrucePeru" which operated many small schools for street children in Peru and Bolivia
  9. We want some of what we fund to be “forward looking”. That is, projects which open up new possibilities…ones which “prime the pump” or “sow the seeds” for greater results in the future, often funded by local or national governments. Some of the education and technical projects do exactly that.
  10. We want projects to have an immediate practical benefit…people who are hungry get something to eat, folks in prison are given hope, homeless get sheltered, orphans and widows are cared for, people get pure water to drink and cleaner air to breathe, troubled children and families get hope and the blind feel encouraged.
  11. We want projects that will provide ongoing sustainable benefits…not something that will drop to nothing when we complete our commitment.
  12. We want to do 10 projects, not 2. We will do our very best to be good stewards, but sometimes things go wrong. If that were to happen and it impacts 5-10% of our work, CMaDFA could survive and even learn from the experience, but if it impacts 50-100% of our work, we wouldn't deserve your ongoing support. So we spread the risk of failure, and so increase the likelihood of multiple successful projects.
  13. We want to get to know the different areas we will work in…find out for ourselves where the greatest needs and opportunities are...so initially we are looking to invest in great projects from all 5 countries from which we have received proposals.
  14. So we met, we prayed, we reviewed the projects one at a time, we each expressed our opinions and preferences. We then added up the total dollars needed to do the projects we believed are most compelling and appropriate, and discovered that this was virtually identical to the funds we had available. This was very encouraging to us.
  15. We also have identified additional projects that we will support as funds become available. None of these is a “second class” project, but simply fell slightly lower in urgency than the first ones we funded.
  16. We need people we can trust, then we need to work with them in a way that encourages good management…extending funds incrementally, as “milestones” are reached and reported, etc.
  17. Remember, none of this work occurs without prayer and none of it occurs without your financial help. We really appreciate the opportunity to serve as your Meal a Day committee, joining you in doing these “good works in the name of Jesus.”