Our Goals and Plan
In sum, Aainda has two main goals:
-
To improve the position of young Afghan women by investing in modern school supplies and educational facilities.
- To foster solidarity between Dutch and Afghan people in the Netherlands.
We aim to achieve the first goal through the following activities:
- Fundraising. We have received a subsidy from the municipality of Maastricht, which recognizes our foundation for its contributions to social integration of migrants and globalisation of the city. In addition, there are several organisations that have expressed their interest in funding Aainda activities. We are currently in the process of writing funding applications for those organizations.
- Recruiting donors.
We aim to achieve our second goal through the following activities:
- We have an explicitly multicultural board
- Organising charity events and participating in public events by offering Afghan food, fashion shows featuring Afghan clothing and music, and by selling traditional Afghan clothing, various other Afghan products, and the cooking book Moeder’s Gerechten (“My Mother’s Recipes”) that was written by our chairperson. We intend to introduce people to a positive perspective on Afghanistan in as many areas as we can. All of these activities aim to improve mutual solidarity.
- Organising cooking workshops, sewing workshops, and traditional Afghan arts and crafts. The things we create in these workshops are also sold to raise additional funds for our cause. In addition, our activities offer a safe and familiar space for women to come together and share their life experiences. We notice a pressing need among Afghan women to build a local social network to rely on for help with practical and social/cultural issues they encounter.
- Exhibitions
- Lectures on Afghanistan for local high schools. We hope to inspire these students to reach out to their peers in Afghanistan over the internet. It may also encourage them to collect useful materials to send to Afghan pupils to help.
- Organising a conference on International Women’s Day (8th of March) for women who would like to help improve the position of women in Afghanistan.
Clearly, these two goals are intimately interrelated. We hope that increasing solidarity between Dutch and Afghan people in the Netherlands will cause Dutch people to feel more closely involved with the fate of Afghanistan. For that cause, we hope to find financial, material, or simply moral support for Aainda.
