Marketing to Millennials requires entirely new ways of connecting.
Making common cause in promoting social good is one of the most effective ways to impact this hard-to-reach demographic.
CampusAuction: Bid for a Better World was created to make it easy for young consumers to find businesses that share their values. Last year’s auction raised $78,000 for great causes. Just one of those amazing projects is changing lives in the poverty-stricken and earthquake-devastated island nation of Haiti.
On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, with an epicentre just 15 kilometres from Haiti’s capital city of Port-au-Prince, left more than 200,000 people dead and millions more injured and homeless.
CampusAuction’s charity partner Free The Children is helping to rebuild the devastated, but strong, country. The work is slow, but Free the Children is focusing on health and education, and improving household and community livelihoods.
Free the Children’s work in the isolated mountain community of Manac is not only repairing the catastrophic damage of the earthquake, but positively changing lives forever.
“Manac is very isolated,” writes Lucas Chéry, the director of operations in Haiti for Free the Children, “No social services or members of the state have been there. There has been no census, most don’t have birth certificates. This is why, in Haiti, we don’t know what the population is. Apart from this one school that is built with stones that parents brought together, there is no other education structure in the area.”
The team that travelled to Manac by mule met with almost everyone in the village to assess the best ways to help.
“When we asked parents what would help improve their livelihood or household income, they all said that a mule would make a world of difference for them, allowing them to carry more produce to the towns beyond the mountains,” Chéry writes.
Education is another crucial component of Free the Children’s plan for Manac.
“Most parents are only able to afford to send one or two of their 7+ children to school (there is no free universal education in Haiti, in fact less than 10% of the schools in the province where we work are national government schools.),” Chéry reports. “But even so, they all have great hopes for their children’s education. When we asked why they feel education is important, one mother said ‘education is important because when my child encounters someone who hands them a paper, I want them to be able to read it and then pass on the word.’”
Free The Children is building a new school structure and providing school supplies for students. The group is also exploring how to bring a mobile health clinic to the area. Then they will look to alternative income for local residents and finding ways to create a bridge between Canadian and American students and those in the tiny mountaintop community.
Free The children is just one of many charities being helped by CampusAuction.
“We are honored to be doing a part to help the disaster-stricken people of Haiti,” says CampusAuction CEO Eyal Lichtmann. “Around the world and around the block, our members are helping to change things for the better.”
For more information about how CampusAuction is changing the world – and how your business can help – contact partnerships@campusauction.com.
