African Well Fund information

Who is in charge?

There is no single person in charge. There are currently about ten people on the Board of Directors, all volunteers and U2 fans. We make decisions as a group. We will be providing information about ourselves on the site soon. We’re certainly not interested in coming on like a bunch of ghosts. It’s only natural for people to want to know as much about us as possible. The information will be there. Everyone will know who the heck we are. This is important to us.

How is the fund organized?

The fund is loosely organized with everyone chipping in his or her time, money and talents. We do have specific tasks assigned to certain people according to their area of expertise (publicity, administration, writing, etc.) Much of our activity is on the Internet. We have weekly chats. People show up at the chats with their ideas. We have a public Yahoogroups discussion list, which has a link at the site. You can join the list at the site. It’s easy to get involved. You can reach our site at http://africanwellfund.org

What kind of assurance does a U2 fan that his/her donation will go where it’s supposed to go? This is answered in the next question.

What will you are doing to protect/safeguard the donations, and how will the transfer from their organization to Africare be handled?

All of the funds raised by the African Well Fund go to Africare. The African Well Fund BOD has signed what’s called a “third party” agreement with Africare. The agreement authorizes the Well Fund to raise money for Africare. All donations go directly to Africare.

If you choose to donate online, our site links directly to Africare’s secure donation page. There is an option on their donation page to indicate that you are a donor from the African Well Fund.

If you choose to donate by mail, there is a form that can be downloaded from our site. You can make your check out to Africare and it will be mailed to them. You can indicate that you are a Well Fund donor by including the code African Well Fund Code U203 in the memo area of your check.

After investigating several charities, we decided to go through Africare because it is well established and highly reputable. A non-profit group that rates charities, Charity Navigator, assigned its highest rating, four stars, to Africare. Charity Navigator bases its ratings on short-term spending and long-time sustainability. Africare has also earned the praises of both Republican and Democratic political officials in the U.S. for its efforts and achievements in Africa. If you would like to know more about Africare here’s a link to their Web site at http://www.africare.org/

How has the response been?

We don’t know yet! We will be receiving quarterly reports from Africare and we are expecting our first report sometime in April. We do know that we’ve collected money. However, we have gotten thousands of hits on our website, so we can only hope that these hits translate into donations. We have received a fantastic response from the U2 fan community. Several U2 fan sites have posted articles about the Fund or linked to our website. We have also received some encouraging feedback from other fans on topics running the gamut from fundraisers to many other issues pertaining to the Fund. Many of these people have become members of our online mailing community. We see this as a real opportunity to bring the U2 fan community together to help our less fortunate brothers and sisters in Africa. If we all get together we can do it! Just think, all of those people will have clean water because we gave them a well! Their quality of life will be drastically improved. We chose to focus on well building because it’s so feasible. Africare has a whole branch of its organization devoted to water works.

What goals do you have?

We will continue to raise money to build wells in Africa until every last person has access to clean water. At the same time we hope to educate the public about the AIDS crisis in Africa. We’d like to correct the popular and mistaken notion that Africa is a hopeless case. It’s not. We would like to unite the U2 fan community in solidarity with our less fortunate brothers and sisters in Africa.

What kind of promotion have you done/do you planned to keep doing to keep the Fund going?

We are in the process of distributing press kits to anyone who asks for one. Our members are scattered all over the world. They are from places like the United States, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Israel and many other lands. We have also made it possible to download the promotional flyers from our website. Anyone who is interested in helping the fund is welcome to. We encourage everyone to get involved!

We will soon be announcing a contest to give away an autographed picture of Bono, graciously donated by a fan. Enter and it might become yours! We will be putting more information out on this competition as it becomes available.