Charities for Michelmas 2007

Jacari

Jacari is one of Oxford’s largest student charities. Jacari is a home teaching scheme which matches student volunteers up with ethnic minority children, who are referred to us by their schools because they face the most severe difficulties in education. Most of these children do not speak English as their first language; many are the children of refugees. Volunteers make a regular commitment to teach their Jacari child, while the committee offer them support and training through teachers’ workshops, college reps and resources. Jacari aims, through improving fluency in English and building self esteem, to raise the educational achievement of disadvantaged children to enable them to achieve their full potential, and to combat racial inequality and division in the long-term.

Moving Mountains

Moving Mountains has an operational NGO in Nairobi and projects mostly in Kenya but also in Nepal and Niger. It provides aid in the relief of hardship, poverty, suffering and inequality through education and vocational training, medical treatment and employment.

It also provides the capital to build and renovate schools, orphanages, community centres and environmental projects, all of which must show a positive socio-economic impact on the population. Moving Mountains:

  • develops community programmes
  • provides advice
  • provides human resources (staff/volunteers)
  • builds facilities and sets up local committees
  • assists families with monthly costs so that they can look after their children
  • funds environmentally sound projects pays for educational and medical needs of children and families

AIRD

AIRD is run by a small team of local people providing education and advice to the rural communities, and is based in Valiyoor in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, India, where they have around 52,000 cases of AIDS. They teach communities about prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDs as well as how to deal with opportunistic infections such as diarrhoea and TB. AIRD provide education for the women of the villages enabling them to teach others. They also help those who have fostered orphans of AIDs to pay for school equipment; often by providing goats and cows which can generate an income for those families. Nutritional packs providing essential proteins are given to families where nutrition is poor.

Changing Faces

If you have a disfigurement you can face discrimination because of the way you look. You might be stared at, bullied, avoided - especially at school and in public. You may find it easier to hide away. But, Changing Faces is about enabling everyone to face disfigurement with confidence whether or not they have a disfiguring condition – and at least 400,000 people in the UK do.

Changing Faces supports and represents children, young people and adults with disfigurements of any kind to the face, hands or body; its work complements medical and surgical treatments by addressing the psychological and social challenges posed by disfigurement through personal support, advocating best practice for professionals and service providers, and campaigning for social change.

International Alert

International Alert is an independent NGO working to build sustainable peace in over 20 countries and territories around the world. We have unique expertise derived from 20 years of working in peacebuilding. Our work is based on an unrivalled combination of direct knowledge of the countries we work in with high-level research and advocacy on strategic peacebuilding issues at national and international levels. We work with local populations in the Great Lakes region of Africa, West Africa, Colombia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and the South Caucasus by providing them with the technical and practical support to engage in the reconstruction of their societies to overcome the social, economic and political consequences of war.