Monday, December 2, 2013

Donations and Transparency

 

Joy decided to inspect the CDJ covers!

 

 

The last foto is the Dj table and now all 6 CDJ's have plastic covers. My cat Joy decided to step in for a foto!

 

I have always felt a little uncomfortable with receiving money donations because I know that many non profit organizations have a history of not being honest where donation money goes. I have always preferred receiving equipment or materials to help our Dj school Spin Rocinha. I think its very important for people to know where there donations are going.

 

Last month a visitor made a tour with us and donated 50 reais and this month we received another donation of 50 reais. I had already made a plan to by compact disk player (CDJ) covers for our equipment. With electronics being so expensive, its important to protect them. Living in the favela complicates things more because of dust and dirt everywhere. I try to keep windows closed in the Dj school to limit any problems. We use a blue tarp to cover the full table but the individual plastic covers work very well on each piece of Dj equipment. Also my cats tend to like to lie or sleep on the equipment so the hard plastic covers will be a more comfortable surface for them.

 

Today, I went to Copacabana to a Dj store called SYGNO MUSIC and bought two CDJ covers which cost 510.00 reais. So, that total of 100 reais in donations helped me to buy these. I need to thank Tom Gingell and John Amos for helping us at Spin Rocinha. We hope that they can return to our project!

 

Our next big plan is to buy a building here so we can expand the Dj school and also have a separate room for a recording studio. We have much talent here in Rocinha and want to open up Spin Rocinha to singers and MC's here in the favela! We will keep you posted!