Promise to Life Foundation NPS 320 Ava Hatty, Prince Owusu, and Serena Cersosimo th April 28 2014

Did you know every day; approximately 800 women die from preventable causes relatable to pregnancy and childbirth (WHO, 2012). Here at Promise to Life Foundation, it is our mission to increase both mother-child survival needs and decrease child mortality rate, specifically focused in Africa. It is our vision that every woman has access to high quality health care services and ensures that children are better developed for the future. With our backgrounds in business, communications, international skills, and nonprofit, we feel we would be very successful working together as an international nonprofit. We hope to have a few locations by the year 2015, and in the future expand internationally. Our main office is located in Charlottesville, VA. We have another office in Ghana, Africa, which is our number one location of need. Below is our proposal for our nonprofit organization, Promise to Life Foundation. Promise to Life Foundation strives for maternal and child morality development with core values of respect, integrity, commitment, and excellence. Our goal is to increase both mother-child survivals, decrease mother-child mortality, educate to empower woman about proper behaviors such as choices and concerns throughout the pregnancy, development projects, alleviate burdens of extreme poverty, educational initiatives. It is our vision to ensure that every woman have access to a high quality health care services and ensuring that children are better developed for the future. It is our mission that we are committed to providing safe home stays pre-natal and post-natal, traveling expenses, basic nutritional needs for nourishment, educate to empower women to gain the knowledge of skills needed, strive to healthy tools that are essential for mother-child survival and development in areas where extreme poverty is evident.

Governance and Board Bylaws Our Governance and Board Bylaws will follow a strict procedure to focus on providing maternal support and healthy child development and to ensure access to high quality facilities and better opportunities for education. Anyone can apply to be a member of this organization, but will undergo a process of eligibility and selection. Members must show an interest in the organization by attending annual meetings, as well as pay a membership fee of $60 a year, or $5 a month. Our Board of Directors will oversee our members. The Board of Directors will be responsible for making decisions regarding the organizations growth and development. They will meet every month and hold a parliamentary procedure to make decision. They will make important assessments of the companys funds and what steps they should take to further the organization into different countries. Their mission should be to provide safe, effective protection to mothers and children in prenatal risk. We want to focus on safety and prevention because Prince has seen the effects of this problem in Africa, and we know it is a problem. The Board will consist of enlightened individuals that have interests that can be directly correlated with prenatal care and international affairs. Anyone can apply to be on the Board of Directors, but must go through a strict interview process. To attain the position, you must show you are educated in this subject, have passion for it, and thrive for our mission. Our Executive Director, Prince, will oversee the Board of Directors. The Executive Director will be the face of the organization because he is the one who came up with the idea for Promise to Life Foundation, because it has affected him personally. His main task will be to make connections with medical professionals and hospitals that would be willing to provide services and help aid the cause in different countries. Along

with that comes the task of making relationships with other companies and donors that would be willing to partner to help the company. If the Board of Directors ever needs a helping hand or advice in order to make a decision, the Executive Director will help guide them in the right direction. He will be the liaison between the Board of Directors and the organization. Members will have the option to be elected by the Board of Directors and Executive Director for different positions or committee members. They are elected every four years in the month of November, before the start of their term. This allows the previous officer to train the incoming officer for their role. The positions will be President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, Fundraising, and four committees. The President will be in charge of the monthly meetings, which are conducted via telecommute, phone, Skype, etc., because we are an international nonprofit, therefore not everyone will be in the Charlottesville office for our meetings, as well as the accountability and performance measures, fundraising efforts, recruitment, volunteers, advocacy, and all other aspects of the nonprofit. Vice President works closely with the President, as well as the Executive Director and Board of Directors to oversee that the process and meetings are running smoothly. The Secretary will be in charge of emailing events and meeting reminders, as well as meeting with all officers to create the agenda for meetings, and take minutes. The Treasurer will be in charge of all financials for the nonprofit. Special meetings are called only if an issue is called to action, in which case we would make a movement. If half of the members second the movement, 2/3 would be called to vote. Treasurer will collected all monetary or supply donations once a year at the second meeting with the minimum requirements of $60 for each member. We want to have a variety of members and officers with various beliefs and skills that will add

different aspects to the nonprofit, such as business, strategic management, long term thinking, communication, and international affairs. There will be five committees in which members can join. The first committee is the executive committee, which will be management rather than governance. It will be the business side of the organization. The second committee will be the board selection that will reach out to hospitals and existing education facilities in America for doctor and volunteer staff. The third committee will be an educational and training initiative. They will be giving guidance to teachers as well as doctors and helping them adapt into proper education of mothers and children. This committee will directly go to Africa with the doctors and help hands on. The fourth committee is the finance committee, which deals with revenue and expenses, working closely with the Treasurer. The fifth committee will be the Pre-natal and Post-natal risk committee. They will be in charge or researching new medical facts pertaining to prenatal and post natal care. Any member can join any committee, but must attend meetings. Each committee meets on a different schedule as needed, via Skype and telecommunications.

Accountability and Performance Our organization will be based out of Charlottesville, VA, but will also be in international locations. Members, certain committees, and the medical team will travel to predetermined African locations based on infant mortality statistics for that year, and work with our local office in Ghana, Africa to provide quality care to women and children in vulnerable areas in Africa. Promise to Life Foundation will have quarterly trips to Africa per year. We will have the volunteers be teaching the education programs which are created through one of the committees. The medical team will be hands-on

helping the mothers and children. The members of the organization will oversee all operations and make sure everything is running smoothly. We believe that these measurements of performance are a key solution to our accountability for Promise to Life Foundation. During our quarterly trips, we will be assessing how successful our operations are by looking at statistics to see how pre and postnatal care has been since we have been stationed there.

Recruitment and Use of Volunteers Our goal for employing medical professionals and recruiting volunteers will follow various guidelines. We are planning on recruiting them from the highest regarded hospitals internationally, as we are an international non-profit. We want to have many different outlooks and knowledge from our medical staff. For medical professionals, we will hire 3 or 4 doctors for the entire company to start. They will work on a salary and perform childbirths and various medical procedures needed for pre and postnatal care. They will be responsible for the most important of circumstances such as the childbirth process and any extreme problems that may arise with our mothers and children. The medics will go through a strict interview process and background check. They must have a passion for international affairs and the services that we are providing, as its going to be a strenuous and life changing job. The next individuals we will hire will be physicians assistants to assist the doctors in anything that they may need in the day-to-day operations. They will also be salary workers and go through the same strict interview process as the doctors.

Physicians assistants will be responsible for prescribing medications, diagnose illness, perform lab tests, and assist in surgery. Psychiatrists will also be a part of our paid team in assisting and helping mothers and children with any emotional and mental complications that they may have in the process. They will provide support in the form of counseling, as well as have the right to prescribe any medications they deem necessary. Psychological changes occur in every stage of pregnancy, so someone should be there to help the mothers cope with any complications. Many problems such as post-partum depression are common in new mothers. They will also be there to educate new mothers about how to stay healthy and what choices to make during their pregnancy. The Board of Directors and members of the organization will also be responsible for keeping up communication with all members of medical staff. This will include informing them of any new rules and regulations either by law or that the organization has come up with. Volunteers will be students that want to go abroad, with backgrounds in health science or education majors (also open to others). They would go for an internship experience (unpaid) over 18. They will go through an extensive interview process because of the close interaction with mothers and children. The volunteers will be there primarily to assist in whatever activities are needed. Since volunteers dont have all of the medical knowledge needed, they will be helping with education programs as well as preparing meals for the mothers and children while theyre involved in our program. Some volunteers might also be more business minded and could assist in the finance

aspect of the company. That could include helping brainstorm ideas on how to be more efficient and manage funds and come up with fundraising ideas. To recruit our volunteers, we will use strategies such as advertising in college newspapers. In addition, we will be visiting college classes that specialize in non-profit, business, and medicine. We could also recruit our volunteers from within hospitals in surrounding areas for people that are specifically interested in helping with medical care. Emailing advisers in the specific majors that we are recruiting from is also another option to get the word out about positions. It will be a great opportunity for people to get experience working for a nonprofit organization, as well as get an internship opportunity abroad. We hope that our volunteers will also turn into future employees after they complete their education, because they will already know about our organization and the passion and mission behind it. Medical professionals and volunteers are going to be the heart of the organization, the people performing the mission and vision of the organization on the day-to-day basis. They need to be committed and responsible people that are committed to helping mothers and children of the cause.

Advocacy and Lobbying Activities The world of lobbying and advocacy is essential to profit and nonprofit organizations. These two concepts are tied to the organizations mission statements and vision statements. The missions of nonprofit organizations are often focused on promoting change in some aspect of society, whether by appealing to individuals to change their behavior, private entities to change their policies, or the government to

change its laws (Armstrong, 2010). Lobbying is a specific type of advocacy and its achieved by influencing government legislation to change policies that affect. As Promise to Life Foundation nonprofit, we will use both advocacy and lobbying to promote the causes we fight for. Our advocacy and lobbying will focus on will education, outreach, grassroots and canvassing to influence public figures and legislation policies. As stated in our mission statement: we will provide safe home stays for prenatal and postnatal, traveling expenses, basic nutritional needs for nourishment, educate to empower women to gain the knowledge of skills needed, strive to healthy tools that are essential for mother-child survival and development in extreme poverty environment. Promise to Life Foundation will use advocacy campaign efforts to engage the public, members, or target groups to directly encourage policymakers to consider policy action on a specific public health issue. Furthermore, According to American Public Health Association, To advocate is to act in support of a particular issue or cause (APHA). Being a public health advocate gives you the opportunity to influence the way the public and policy-makers think and act on public health policies. Advocacy and lobbying will become a key principle and critical part to our mission. We will ask citizens to contact their elected officials, specifically congressional leaders who are capable to change policies affecting prenatal and postnatal. This approach will be done through grassroots lobbying. According to Kate Armstrong, grassroots lobbying is is defined as communications with the general public that express a view about specific legislation and include a call to action (Armstrong, 2010). Promise to Life Foundation will use such method of lobbying to influence public members to contact their congressional leaders about health care policies that could affect

our nonprofit organization. We believe that if people can express their views on specific pending legislative proposals, they have the ability to influence it from passing into law. Another approach that Promise to Life Foundation will perform is through grassroots canvassing. Canvassing is important because it allow us to contact citizens to be aware of prenatal and postnatal issues.

Funding and Philanthropy Mechanisms All of our costs will be paid for through membership fees, sponsors, donors, grants, and revenue. We broke down our financials and funding into four categories; medical expenses, administrative expenses, transportation and living expenses, and fundraising and marketing expenses. The majority of our costs will be based on medical expenses such as first aid kids, hospital equipment, emergency costs, educational classes, nutritional needs, and medicine. We are going to be paired up with sponsored hospitals, which will allow most of the hospital equipment and medicine to be covered. We will have administrative expenses such as salaries for doctors, physicians, psychiatrists, and executive director, rent for our main office, utilities, board members, training, staff development, technology expenses such as international phones and Wi-Fi. Our transportation and living expenses will be shipping costs of medical supplies, flying costs for doctors, nurses, and members, housing for people involved, etc. Fundraising and marketing expenses will be concerts to raise awareness, postage and mailing expenses, campaigns and social media. To raise funds to operate Promise to Life Foundation, we will be using our philanthropic model. We want to get a percentage of our money from government grants because we feel it would catch the support of our citizens. We will also have a

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membership fee for each month. Every member will have to pay $5 a month to be a member of this organization. Another philanthropic strategy we have is through fundraising. We will fundraise through various events such as concerts to raise awareness, possibility teaming up with celebrities to gain audience appeal. We will also utilize social media as a philanthropic technique by having a donate now button on our website, as well as raise awareness through tweets, Facebook statuses, Instagram pictures, etc. We will offer a twestival which is a tweeting festival to gain interest of donors, by putting a sponsored ad up, and whoever gets the most favorite or retweets can join us on a trip to help mothers and children in Africa! We got this idea from a case study by Kanter and Fine (2010), which studied Charity: Water, and how they used twestival to bring donors and funding. If we follow steps similar to this article such as building a network, credibility, and transparency through social media, it will bring philanthropic success. We will also use advertising as a philanthropic technique, such as having commercials like donate a dollar a month to help this child, etc. We want to reach out to other mothers who know what it is like to have a child, buy having hospitals sponsor our program, which will allow us to post on hospital bulletin boards and newsletters to promote our program. We also want to get our organization out to other areas of interest by writing memos to writers to have an interest in our nonprofit to publish in the weekly articles for nonprofits and other organizations, anything from publicity magazines to national geographic. In conclusion, Promise to Life Foundation strives to increase both mother-child survival needs and decrease child mortality rate, specifically in Africa. We envision a world where every woman has access to high quality health care services and ensures that

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children are better developed for the future. With this proposal, we hope to accomplish this dream.

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References Armstrong, K. (2010). Advocacy and Lobbying for Nonprofit Organizations. A Fact Sheet by the Public Health Law. Retrieved April 20th 2014 from http://phlc.stylefish.com/sites/default/files/resources/phlc-fs-advocacy 2010.pdf Kanter, B., & Fine, A. H. (2010). The networked nonprofit [electronic resource] : connecting with social media to drive change / Beth Kanter, Allison H. Fine ; foreword by Randi Zuckerberg. San Francisco : Jossey-Bass, c2010 The Voice of Public Health. (2010). American Public Health Association. Retrieved on May 20th 2014 from http://www.apha.org/NR/rdonlyres/6B9FFE75 190147E5-907A-8F951C554D4D/0/APHAAdvocacyFAQFinal.pdf

World Health Organization (May 2012). Maternal mortality. Retrieved http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs348/en/

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