Building Bridges Toolkit

The Toolkit was designed to collect and share the know-how on voluntary projects involving people seeking or who have recently found refuge, as well as raising awareness on forced migration in general. The collection of guidelines, methods and case studies is non-exhaustive and should simply foster your own inspiration and support you in implementing projects on the topic. The creation of the Toolkit has been driven by the ever bigger need of the international SCI network to exchange best practices on projects in the field. It was coordinated by SCI Switzerland with the support of Útilapu Hungary. Its existence wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the Mercator Foundation Switzerland and the active contribution of the Building Bridges working group and a number of SCI branches.

METHODS AND TOOLS serve to support your work on the topic of refugees and migration with different target groups.

FUNDRAISING DINNER

Raise funds and awareness

Time needed: 2-4 hours + preparation time

Objectives / aim: Collect funds for activities with refugees and asylum seekers, raise awareness about the topic

Level of Difficulty: medium; the level of difficulty depends on your resources and amount of funds that you need to collect

Resources needed: Volunteers to organize, a group of good cooks, place, food ingredients (there is no need for a big budget, since the budget consists of the price that is paid for the dinner), program

Number of participants: As many that you can fit to the place and serve food to

Contact / Source: Emmi Ruohonen emmi.ruohonen@kvtfinland.org

Steps:

1. Find a group of volunteers that would be in charge of organizing such an event and prepare the meals.

2. Set the time and place of the event.

3. Find guest speakers and performers.

4. Make the invitations and consider who you would like to invite. Send the invitations early enough, so people could be able to make it. In the invitation set a deadline for subscription and paying for the dinner so you know how many guests are coming and what the budget is.

5. If you want to increase the visibility to the event, invite media.

6. Prepare a presentation of your organization and the work that you do.

7. Plan the meals and amount of ingredients that you need.

Tips:

  • For a fundraising dinner it is important to invite people beforehand, set a subscription date and ask to pay the dinner card beforehand. This way you can calculate how much you can spend and guarantee to make profit. KVT collected over 1000 € with this kind of event and could place 20 asylum seekers on SCI voluntary workcamps in Finland!
  • Remember to consider allergies and diets and ask about them beforehand.
  • Make sure to count in free meals for the guest speakers, performers and volunteers.
    Note that the preparation takes some time and efforts, depending on how much resources you have and how big you want the event to be.

CONTRIBUTE!

You can share your experience, observations, tips and tricks, pictures etc. by uploading for instance a method or a case study to the Building Bridges Toolkit. As this Toolkit is a work in progress to which all involved parties are invited to contribute, we would also be very grateful for your support and contribution in order to inspire others to continue the work towards peace and intercultural understanding.