New Rugs, a new organisation and national TV coverage

These are the three big things that happened this week.

First the carpets arrived on the back of a truck.

All 320 odd carpets from the new shipment arrived this morning and are now packed in my garage, with the exception of 10 rounds which have been sent to Cairns via greyhound.

There are lots of brilliant colours and people will love them as usual! This time we have 150 small .4 x .5m mats as well as the new .45 x .65 mats and the new .65 x 1.6m runners as well as the usual rounds, runners and some ying yang designs.

Nearly Legal.

After years of operating under partnership agreements we've taken the plunge and on Friday we lodged our application to become a legally registered organisation.

To be on national TV

Kerrie from ‘Compass’ (ABC tv show) called me for the second time this week and confirmed that they will be shooting CfC for one of their programs when we are in Sydney in the first week of December.


Next week i’m lucky enough that i'm being flown to Sydney for an interview by Foundation for Young Australians. They want to set up a program here that i participated in in Washinton D.C in 2006 (http://www.youthactionnet.org/) and are interviewing all participants.

For me next week (and the weeks after) is all about calling retailers and delivering rugs. Next Friday we'll be setting off in the van for Melbourne and Sydney to deliver rugs and help set up some market stalls.

Gearing up for some serious expansion

To continue on from the post below...

And what a ride it was on the boat from Siem Reap to Battambang...



I've been back in Adelaide 2 months and I still remember that 8 hours it took to cover only about 100km.



It was also the start of a bad run I had with sunburn that trip... But it was worth it in the end. We had a good meeting with PKO (http://www.pkocambodia.org/) in Battambang about possible collaboration and if all goes well they are going to trial the CfC program with 5 of their target families.

The main highlights from the trip were the traidcraft / AAC workshop on Social Enterprizes that I spoke at and the subsequent meetings with the Ministry of Woman's affairs. They love the project and want to contract us to implement it in their target areas in Siem Reap (out the back of Angkor Thom temple).

This will expend the project and give us the funds we need to produce a lot more and keep going until we can sell them. We've already spent the Ashoka grant on bringing production back up to full levels and hiring new staff and now we are waiting on the 10k from the International Youth Foundation so we can start production in Siem Reap with another 20 families.

But first thing's first.. we need to get registered here in Australia and then in Cambodia so that we are a legal body. It's been great to work as a partnership with other organisations but we've separated from our partner in Cambodia and we're now starting to take on enough momentum and deal in big enough dollars that we need to be a legally registered entity.

 

I'd also like to welcome the new staff:

Mongheng SENG (Heng) who will be our new Country Manager.

Naren CHUUT who will be the office manager in Poipet.

And

Chetra CHOU who will be our logistics and procurement officer.

You can read more about them in the upcoming newsletter.

 

More next week on plans, names and new offices...