Tola’s Dream ClubNoah Yeh

Quick Pitch – Never Give Up

We knew about Tola’s dreams via ELIV’s introduction, Tola had the ambitious dream of building schools and improving education in Cambodia, yet he passed away in facing cancer and could not see to the end of his dreams. We were moved by his never-yielding spirit and also his aspiration to make Cambodia a better place for children to grow up. We also find us as Taiwanese possess the nature to help, we hope to move forward the Taiwanese brand from just being nice to aggressively taking actions to help the world, creatively, and with real results.

Tola is a great start that inspired all of us, and we’re hoping not only to carry on his dreams but to make it even bigger along the way.

Overview of Cambodia’s Education

People see education as the way out of poverty, the country’s education system, once the envy of many countries in Southeast Asia, was almost totally destroyed in the 1970s by the Khmer Rouge (the red communists), Provincial authorities instead of central government were responsible for all expense in local education with meager funding from the Ministry of Finance and Economics.

Improvements in recent years mostly come from foreign organizations and donors, teachers are extremely underpaid and had to resort to charging students unofficial fees. Many don’t spend as much time in classrooms as they seek employment elsewhere. From every 1,000 students who began primary school, only 27 will graduate from upper-secondary school, not to mention how girls, the poor and students from remote areas are underrepresented.

Kevin if I got anything wrong or have anything missing please let me know.

Possible Approaches

Kevin Chen has laid out 3 ways we can do this, beginning from the smallest scale as listed below

Tola has been tutoring 12 local kids, the least we can do here is sponsor a teacher to keep their education.

Building classrooms and accommodations for local children

Build a community that train more people like Tola, build a financially sustainable education system.

The Plan (1st Draft)

Abiding Principles

Result-oriented, number tracking ex. Determine how we’re going to calculate our influence

Execute “creatively” to raise awareness ex. Bottle school (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pi2LBldLJ4)

Social responsibility should come in all aspects in the project ex. Building a “green” school

Experiment Pilot Support Scale Sustain

Experiment with bottles or other

materials, experiment how

the team will work

Kevin visiting Cambodia with experimented

methods, a beta test for the

project

Getting corporate funding support for initial local

research and scale

Scale the project with initial

funding, first large scale prototype

Execute a business model that could scale

and sustain

Phase 1 , Experiment

There are a couple of things we will need to brainstorm and experiment The core team – how will we work together?

This core team should be the ones who would take sole responsibility for the project, meaning they will need to spend at least a certain amount of time and effort to move the project forward, they will also be the ones tracking the results.

The classrooms – What kind of things are we going to build This should go beyond partitions built by bottles, we

need to consult someone with experience or even have them design a prototype school that not only sustains but possess an intent to educate, for example, paper desks and chairs.

The classrooms are meant to be low cost, easy to build and with educational meanings.

Calculate expected cost for each unit

Phase 2, Pilot

Pilot is a prototype that we need to create to Alpha test our program, finding possible local

execution issues

Record materials to persuade potential sponsors and investors in Our ability to execute

Potential brand image that can be attached to the proposed brand

ELIV’s local connections and its past results

We’ll need to shoot videos and take photos of local site constructions, details to be laid out.

Verify costs and other issues.

Phase 3, Support

We’ll need Brands to come and play a role in this in order to Fund research

Fund initial buildings

Raise awareness

Possible sponsors Pepsi, Coke, 永豐餘

Challenge Why would a Taiwanese brand fund

anything outside of Taiwan?

Phase 4, Scale

In this phase we should have gotten a model that’s proven to be working, whatever the model is we should be able to scale it so this model can help more children.

Result tracking at this stage will be more important, details will depend on the results of the first 3 stages.

This stage might also involve donations.

Phase 5, Sustain

This stage will make the program a long-term sustainable business instead of a short-term charity program

The Vision

An education environment independent from the government.

A new era campus that’s low cost, sustainable and educationally meaningful.

Infuse digital to open doors for local children to the world.

Note

This is still a very early draft, please provide as many feedbacks as possible, we can go through all the details together.