All the big things you can see around started with a dream. And like all dreams, to become true it requires effort and not always can be done alone.
The “Marmita Na Estrada” project did not even had a name when we started talking and dreaming about how cool it would be to be able to call any place “our place”. Give up the security and comfort of our homes and give the chance to destiny, or whatever you want to call it, play a bigger role in our lives. Just feel alive!
The plan was simple, but not easy. Several were the reasons: buying a motorhome without any experience, returning the rented apartment and all the work it would require, downsizing, and living on the road.
By a start, how can we make money to buy the motorhome? How can we maintain life on the road? What if we don’t like it? What if we get a problem with the motorhome? and the list goes on and on, and on …
First what comes first, if we don’t have a motorhome why bother answering … most probably, wrongly, so many questions? So we focused on the main 2 problems: Find the motorhome and buy it.
Eventually, we found it, and so we moved to the second problem, how to get enough money to buy it?
Crowdfunding Campaign
On a weekend my wife and I went to see the motorhome we have found. The owner showed us and on the way home, we were both in the car … and a silence 😶. I think my wife was waiting for me to say something and but I was daydreaming, so it might have taken a while until a word got out of my mouth… “Tais, I’m in love! I wish I were driving her home now! If only we had the money…”
The next morning a crowdfunding campaign was online and we were asking friends and family to help us. Btw, the credits for the campaign go entirely to my wife who prepared everything on her own.
In the end, we didn’t manage to get the whole amount, but it was a considerable quantity and we are super glad!
The premise of the campaign was, the money is not for us, we will make use of it now, but it will be returned, not for the donors but for charity institutions fighting for causes we believe in.
Time to pay the bill
The time to pay the bills has come and we selected 4 projects to help:
1 — Against Malaria Foundation: 400,000 people and more than 200 million falls ill every year with Malaria. The foundation provides nets so the population in places affected with malaria can sleep under.
2 — The Humane League: With more than 9 billion land animals raised in the U.S. every year for meat, milk, and eggs, we cannot just stand by while they suffer on today’s factory farms.
3 — AgroFavela: Since 2020, AgroFavela has been promoting workshops in Paraisopolis, São Paulo, teaching women how to grow their greens, make money, and showing how it is possible to be healthy even during the pandemics.
4 — Local project in our home place: This is a local initiative started by a friend that every month provides food to people in need in our region.
Really Successful Campaign!
Now you may be asking: How come it was a successful campaign if you didn’t manage to get all the money needed? Well, not always we can have everything, but we can certainly try to get the most out of what we have.
Besides our friends and family support with the campaign, we also sold a great part of our belongings, and added by a discount we could finally afford the motorhome 🙌 and now checking back the numbers, we managed to donate 144% more than what we have committed to.
And now?
Well, the campaign is over but the willingness to keep helping people around remains 💪. We will keep helping those institutions anyway, and we’d like to invite you to do the same, practice effective altruism.
