General update

Hi guys
 
Hope everyone is well and is enjoying the fine weather!  It's been incredibly warm in Galway since last weekend, like being back in Turkey.  Anyway, all is well in the world of Foundation Nepal.  We are hoping to reschedule our May trip to July, and politically things have settled down again in Nepal.  Nirmala is up in Humla at the moment, doing all the detailed planning and budgeting work for Irish Aid with the villagers, so once this piece is finalised, our proposal is in pretty good shape!  The audit has to be finished but it's coming along, and I think we are looking good for the 11th June deadline!  Amber is very busy, working on all of this, while Tara is working on the audit and corporate governance policies.
 
Amanda is busy with our Flag Day on Monday 7th June.  At the moment we are hoping to have two bouncy castles on the prom, along with DJ Will Softly who will be playing some nice music, and our sand castle competition on ladies' beach!  In town, we are hoping to have entertainment as well, so hopefully we will get a fine day, and the OK from Galway City Council, and our volunteers, and it will all come together.
 
I am busy working on fundraising, as ever.  Yesterday I had a very positive meeting with a philantropic foundation, so we need to put together a detailed proposal for them to cover funding for the next few years for their next board meeting, which is in early August.  They also want to come out to Humla to visit some of our villages in September / October, so that's going to be a real experience for them!  I hope they like a bit of rough!
 
If we can get this approved and get Irish Aid over the line, we will be just in an incredibly strong position, and it will totally transform us.  At the moment, so much of my time goes on fundraising, and if we had secure funding, I could spend so much more time working on developing the local economy up in Humla.  So I'm really hoping we can get all this over the line! 
 
In the meantime, we have to survive on all the bits and pieces, like flag days, bag packing, funding from staff charity funds and smaller foundations, donations from the general public, and proceeds from our own events.  So it's very busy and we need to do a lot of work to get the funds in.  So it's going to remain very busy and very tight on cashflow until we can get some Irish Aid / philantropic funding over the line.  We have lots of events coming up over the summer, and quite a bit of bag packing, and our summer newsletter to go out, so I think we'll be OK and we'll cobble it all together.  Still, it would be so nice to have proper, predictable, stable funding in place.  Very hard to run programmes in Nepal which require continuous monthly funding when we never know what funds are going to come in from week to week.  But I guess we have managed like this since 2007, so we can manage another few months.  The difference is that in 2007, we had a large cash surplus and until this year, I always had 30K plus stashed in a long term deposit account, but alas we had to depete our cash reserves so we don't have this buffer anymore. 
 
Anyway, I will fly.  Donagh is in great form, and his first birthday is coming up next Friday - I can't believe he's been in the world almost a year already!  Hope everyone is keeping well.  Does anyone think that there are a few green shoots of recovery?  I think things are beginning to stablise, but maybe I'm just being eternally optimistic!
 
Lots of love
Nicky XXX