GongYi Home of Hope

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Support – Donation Questions

Question

Is the Home of Hope financially supported by the Chinese government?

Answer

The only support the Home of Hope receives from any entity in China is occasional assistance from the local government officials in areas of education for the children; i.e. helping get the children enrolled in the local schools when we bring them into the orphanage. No monetary or tangible assistance is received. All funding for the Home of Hope is by free will donations and offerings, which go through the Next Towns Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit foundation founded for the sole purpose of providing those people who support the Home of Hope, legal protection for their contributions and a legal tax receipt for their use when they prepare their income taxes.


Question

I thought with the monthly support given for a child, a percentage of that is administrative. Please correct me if I am wrong. Your clarification is extremely important. Just recently I resigned from the board of a nonprofit. One point among a few contentions was: what was said in a support flyer about giving a love offering to orphans versus the actual amount given from the pool of support raised.

As you had explained in your e-mail when funds are allocated for a specific need, all of the funds go toward that specific need. I thank you for the clarification.

Answer

Hi again Joyce,

In regard to your question regarding monthly support. In our opinion this is different than a direct project as in “Winter Coats” or a “Boiler System” or other specific projects.

The reason we say this is two fold. First of all with a direct project like those mentioned in the above paragraph, the total funds needed are easy to determine by either bids from outside contractors or in-house estimates based on past experience. Once the total amount needed is determined, that amount becomes the project budget and all funds go directly to that project with nothing being held back for overhead, administration fees or other hidden charges. Whereas with individual children we have a lot more to do around here than spend all our working moments on cost tracking for each child… Thus the averaging, as is explained in more detail below.

Secondly, with monthly support for an individual child, we can’t just turn the funds over to the child and say… ‘here… Take care of yourself’. Instead we take care of the child by providing food, clothing, medicine, medical needs, care giver service, electric, water, heat, education, books, study materials, entertainment, to name some or most of them (I’m sure we missed a few). These items along with more (I’m sure)… I’m not looking at our accounting program right now… Just going off the top of my head…. are used to calculate an average cost per child based on real costs and the number of children we have.

This does not include facility expenses (i.e. maintenance or land lease or other like items), non-care giver employee slaries, employee insurances, transportation costs, equipment costs, etc. These items are covered by donations and offerings that are not designated for specific children but are for the general needs of the orphanage. If you note, I included ‘care giver service’ (above) which is the real cost of labor (not including comprehensive insurances) of those employees who’s primary purpose is the daily care of the children. That does not include things like the labor costs of our driver, maintenance personnel, office help or other indirect labor costs. Foreign administrator expenses are not calculated in any of the our budgetary items as we require all foreign administrators to have their own means of support so they do not place an unnecessary drain on the orphanage funds. As an example, we receive monthly income from other sources not related to the Home of Hope. Not much, but enough for our personal living expenses.

So to put this all in a nutshell, if at anytime we list administration costs in the breakdown of specified monthly support for a child it would only be the portion of ‘care giver service’ (labor) directly associated with caring for the child and nothing else.

Of course, in any of these calculations there are some variances that cannot be identified. As an example, cost of education… a primary school child would be a good example… when you first started supporting your child, he was much smaller and generally speaking elementary school is provided by the government. Of course we still buy the books, work materials, special (required) uniforms and such. So at that point his cost of education was not as much as say an older child’s would be. Now your child is in middle school. His cost of education is much more expensive now and it will continue to get more expensive… Now we don’t feel right going to each contributor and saying “Ok… This year the child you support is at a higher education cost level so you need to change your contribution amount”. We would have no support in a quick time if we did that. That is why we go with an average. We do feel that overall it is a fairly accurate picture. Maybe not for this particular year or that particular year but if one considers that kindergarten is more expensive than elementary school as are middle school, high school and of course college, one can’t necessarily say that when a child is very small it should be less. Also as an example, we spend a great deal more on the nursery children due to things like formula, baby wipes and other things required for infants and including more doctor visits that college children don’t use… So all in all, even though the averaging is not “to the penny” accurate, it ends up being fairly close I feel and at the end of the year when we do our reports it is of course accurate to the penny by category.

You said, “I thought with the monthly support given to my sponsored child, a percentage of that is administrative. Please correct me if I am wrong. Your clarification is extremely important. Just recently I resigned from the board of a nonprofit. One point among a few contentions was: what was said in a support flyer about giving a love offering to orphans versus the actual amount given from the pool of support raised.”

Sadly this is somewhat of what were referring to in our last letter. These kinds of things also cause us a problem in developing support for all our children. Our Home of Hope organization is now publishing a monthly cost per child of $108.00. On occasion we get somewhat nasty letters from people questioning and asking what kind of con we are running when they can find tons of organizations who say things like “your $0.50 cents per day (that’s $15.00 per month) will support a child…. How does one compete with that when we are publically saying our children cost much, much more?

We personally don’t believe there is any country on earth where that would be true… Or even $30.00 per month or $50.00 per month if the child is being properly cared for and given a good and comfortable home like we attempt to do. But these organizations (and I have talked to them in the past) count on many people responding and the accumulated amounts help to cover the cost per child. We considered this concept many years ago. Should we publish a fictitious amount per month/week/day for the cost per child as some others do, keeping it lower than reality in hopes that more people would donate or should we post what we consider an accurate figure (as accurate as it can be based on the average) and just depend on our being 100% ethical generating enough support? Of course we chose the later.

One thing to remember is this. We have never failed to meet our obligations during the last ten years. There were times we thought we would be late on meeting them but in the end people have always come through. We have people like yourself who designate their monthly support to a specific child. There are other who just designate it “child support” with no specified child being named and there are those who just send offerings for general funding.

With the total and accumulate receipts, we do meet all of our obligations… Pay all our operating expenses… And based on how we do it, when a person writes and says they want to donate monthly to a specific child but don’t want any of the funds to go to overhead or administrative expenses, I can honestly say that we do use all the funds designated for a specific child for that specific child.

That is the best we know how to explain our methods to you. We know you have worked in the areas of finance and such for many years and if you can give us a better method or way of doing this and or reporting, we would welcome your ideas. We by no means claim to be experts in this field other than we are bound by an attitude of “this is not our money… It belongs to the children” and make every attempt to apply proper stewardship to the process with all honesty and transparency as we possibly can.

Let me know if my explanations are not adequate.