When Ingy and I started Amazingy we wanted to do something more then “just” start an online shop. We did not just want to sell stuff, but also create a feeling of happiness around it  – I hope you know what I mean if you ever ordered from us. On top of that, we wanted to do some good in the world. Of course the easiest way is to simply donate an x amount of money to a charity foundation. The problem with most charities though, is that people have no idea about where the money ends up.  Everybody knows the stories of CEO’s of charities driving 80.000 euro cars and getting a 6 figure paycheck, right?

That’s why me and Ingy came up with the idea of supporting small charity projects with Amazingy. We would choose the projects ourselves, stay involved, and most of the time know the people behind it personally. But where to start? Did we even know somebody who was really involved in anything like the? And then, like so often happens, an answer was served to us on a silver platter – in the form of an email from Kim’s parents. Now, I’m not a superstitious guy at all but sometimes it does seem like the universe is helping us out a little bit, doesn’t it?

But first, who’s Kim van Grinsven?

We met Kim for the first time on the beach in Barcelona during Sonar music festival. She was a friend of a friend, and we had a couple of fun nights that involved a lot of Spanish wine from the supermarket, and dancing until the sun came up in the early morning.

After that we’d occasionally run into each other and say hi, but that was it. We actually hadn’t seen her for some years, when we got the email from her parents who had sent the same email to Kim’s entire address book. Basically it said: when traveling through Africa in an old camper (bear in mind, this is a pretty, young, blond girl) Kim stranded in Senegal where she’s now trying to help the street children there. If you have any money to spare, Kim can really use it for medication, clothes, food, and so on. Attached were some pretty sad, but still beautiful pictures of Kim and “her” children. Me and Ingy were both crying. We had just found our first project.

You have to know that at this time, there was no Maison de la Lumière or anything planned like that. Kim was just out there helping (and probably flirting with the guys a bit). But after the email a lot of people reached out to Kim, who then decided to make her little project an official foundation. To say she did well is an understatement: her brand-spanking new foundation reached ANBI status (meaning gifs are tax deductable) in it’s first year – something almost no other charity can say and proof of complete transparancy and extremely low overhead costs.

We tried to support her as much as we could. We emailed a lot and – while still working on Amazingy.com – we developed the website for her foundation. Also, we decided to collect money for her – for every order at Amazingy,  a percentage of our turnaround (not profit!) goes to one of our charity projects. If we can give more, it’s more. We are happy to say, we now raised 1000 euro for Maison de la Lumiere. And we couldn’t have done that without you, our customers. So hereby, we’d like to send a big THANK YOU your way!

The first 500 euro were already transferred to Kim some time ago. She was able to do spend it on:

– Nutritious food
– 32 pairs of shoes and 2 sets of clothing for each child
– Healthcare (like the current epidemic eye infection)
– Hygiene (like toothbrushes, soap, detergents, etc.)
– (French) Education, notebooks and pens
– A better location to educate the children.
– Improvements of this location – build a roof, paint the walls, etc.
– and last but not least, some footballs!

The next 500 euro has been transfered last month. From this money, Kim and her crew will be able to get tap water inside the childrens home. This will make a huge difference! For more info please see http://maisondelalumiere.org/water-from-the-tap/

Make sure to go through the photos’s on top of this page to get a general idea about how much Kim is able to do with such a relatively small donation! If you feel like doing more, you can sign up on her website to become a volunteer (this will be a holiday you’ll never forget!) or simply donate some extra money.

Now, up to our next project. More info about this soon!

Floris