Lucky me – the week of Happy Heights, when nervousness had settled at the back of my brain because it was my first time to ever do something like it, I met U! Happy Events at VSO’s Volunteering Expo. By the look of their booth (a tarp with pictures full of children, a cute hand-drawn type logo, and a Karen O song from the soundtrack of Where the Wild Things Are playing), I had a gut feeling they could help me. And I was right.
U! Happy Events is a non-government organization whose core competency is events for underprivileged children. They seek to serve both the children and the people who want to help these children. For their partner NGO’s and groups, they provide the valuable services of:
- giving donations to supplement their partners’ outreach events
- providing volunteers who will participate in their partners’ outreach events
- event management and facilitation
All of these things are fairly straightforward, but they’re of immense value to people who want to mount an event. Personally, their help is something that would have made my project go much faster and much more efficiently.
Their #1 battle cry explains the U in U! Happy Events. “We believe the change starts with U!” Since 2006 they’ve been doing their collective best to activate volunteerism. At the same time, matching volunteers with kids’ organizations is one of the ways they give support to these NGO’s, foundations, and private individuals and companies.
As you might guess, their whole framework in doing so starts with a U too…
Funnily enough, I volunteered with them without knowing it. Someone from iVolunteer Philippines invited me to try volunteering in one of the events on their site. Kite-flying, she said. For sure, i said. 🙂 Lo and behold, it was a U! Happy event!
Here are some pictures from a fun, well-spent Saturday (March 23rd) with U! Happy Events wherein I met some awesome kids from Payatas and learned how to fly a kite. It was their 199th event.
So, if you have any event you’d like to push for, you know who you gonna call. Want to help, but having problems looking for a community to sponsor? Finding it difficult to look for resources and manpower for your great outreach idea? U! Happy is right here. On their page, you can even Create Your Own Event:
Try it!
Hopefully, I get to partner with them as well for a second leg of Happy Heights 🙂