TRAS Sponsorship Program
For only $40 a month, you can sponsor a child. Your sponsorship enables a child to receive an education. Your support provides physical, material and more importantly emotional well-being for a child.
Do you want to help a child with a chance to grow up healthy and with enough education to improve their lives and those of their families and communities?
Through the TRAS sponsorship program, you can support the education of a child in the Himalayan region, one of the poorest in the world. Children needing sponsorship may be orphans; or their parents may simply be too poor to send them to school, or even to support them.
The sponsorship program began more than 50 years ago. When George and Inge Woodcock (TRAS’s founders) met the Dalai Lama in exile in 1962, his main concern was the children, many orphaned or semi-orphaned, who arrived in India with the flood of refugees from Tibet. “These are our future,” he said, “without them there will be no future; they need a secure place to live, food and education.” He asked his elder sister to set up an orphanage and school to care for them; thus the Tibetan Children’s Village schools were started. His request to George and Inge was to help the children.
TRAS began sponsoring children as a means of raising funds to care for them. Our first sponsored children are now older, many having become successful professionals who in turn are now helping those who follow.
As the Tibetan refugees were settled throughout India and Nepal, TRAS began to help poor children in these countries as well.
Cost
The cost to sponsor a child is $480 a year until the child graduates. TRAS is a registered charity and we will send you a charitable tax receipt. TRAS sends $440 to the settlement (in two disbursements – January and June) and 100% of that goes to the child or the family; we use the remaining $40 to cover administration costs.
If you would like to send a monetary gift to your sponsored child (we suggest no more than $10 – $20), you can include it with your sponsorship payment. We will include the gift with our disbursements which are sent in two payments, one in January and one in June. Make sure you have made a notation that you are including a gift.
Correspondence
The settlements or schools send letters from the children at least once each year, which we forward to their sponsors. Often they may include photos, drawings, and report cards.
The children love to receive cards, letters and photos from you. It is important to keep your letters simple and photographs culturally sensitive. TRAS supports the preservation of their local culture and beliefs and we request our sponsors to respect this. Photographs displaying wealth and “beach” scenes may not be appropriate. You must also be patient as mail to our remote settlements is not dependable and sometimes takes many weeks. Send all correspondence to TRAS and we will forward to the settlement or school.
Monitoring
Besides the letters and photos from the children, we also regularly check with the settlements and schools to confirm that all of the children being sponsored by TRAS members are still attending school and in need of sponsorship.
Becoming a sponsor
If you’d like to sponsor a child through TRAS, please e-mail sponsorship@tras.ca, or call our office at (604) 224-5133. Our sponsorship director will send you a couple of choices and you can decide who to sponsor.
Payment
Payments are due in January for the year and you can divide the yearly sponsorship fee into monthly or quarterly payments.
The fee can be paid by:
- Post-dated cheques
- Canada Helps at www.canadahelps.org
- Credit card – call (604) 224-5133 with credit card details
- Interac e-transfer
- Transfer of securities – call or email the office for instructions and forms
Length of sponsorship
The length of time you commit is your choice but we request a minimum of a year. Longer term sponsorships are more rewarding both to you and the child. Depending on their particular situation, children start school at different ages, some graduating in their mid-20’s.
After you begin sponsoring a child, towards the end of the year, we’ll ask if you can renew your sponsorship. If your circumstances have changed and you can’t continue, please let us know. We’ll do our best to find another sponsor to continue with the sponsorship.
The sponsorship ends when the child either graduates from school (school ends at Grade 12) or has to leave the school for another reason (e.g. receives free placement, illness, family moves away, goes to work or quits school).
Currently supported by TRAS
Tibetan’s Children’s Village – Dharamsala
Tibetan Homes Foundation – Mussoorie
Rinchen Zangpo Society (Munsel-ling School) – Spiti
Tibetan Women’s Centre – Rajpur
Tibetan Children’s Village – Suja
Tibetan Children’s Village – Lower Chauntra
Dekyiling Handicraft Centre cum Training & Charitable Society -Dehradun
Chauntra Tibetan Village – Chauntra
Please contact us today – by phone (604) 224-5133 or by email to sponsorship@tras.ca.
Thank you for your support!