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Funding the Canterbury Eid Festival

So over the past 2-3 weeks we have all been extremely busy working on multiple things to prepare for this huge event. For me, one of my big tasks has been sponsorships and donations. It is a lot of pressure because, without the money we will not be able to pull off this huge awesome event we have planned.

Our idea was to give the smaller local businesses first dibs on sponsorships. This is because, we have included to market very strongly for our sponsors on our website, Facebook and of course, at the Eid Festival. By doing so, we believed that we could help these businesses gain more customers from the people who don’t know about them (we are expecting almost 800 people to turn up!). So it is really a win-win situation for Nawawi Center and for the sponsors!

So during August, Abdifatah and I set out around Christchurch city to approach local Muslim owned businesses. The plan was to pitch our sponsorship proposal document to them and hopefully get them to sign up or at least think about it. We visited the Halal Butcher, MEFCO, Afghan Restaurant, ProTect Auto, and many others. This was our first time attempting something like this so we did not really know what to expect.

After visiting all these stores we noticed that none of these businessmen made their decision straight away, however the majority of them were very interested and impressed by our decision to start something here in Christchurch and the approach we took. Many of them pledged to either donate money, their products or become a sponsor, which was a good sign!

We gave everyone time to think about it and decided to approach them after 3-5 days. After seeing them again, some had made their decisions, some had not. However, nearly all of the businesses we approached contributed in some way, which was more than enough for us.

From then until now, I am very happy and proud to say that we have raised almost $4000 from sponsorship and donations which is really amazing. We expanded our approach to bigger Muslim Organizations and we hope that our event will help bring more customers to all the small and larger businesses that funded us. Their generous and kind contributions will definitely be noticed by our community.

If you are thinking of sponsoring or donating to our event, then go here and sign up. Remember, any kind of contribution is good enough for us and will definitely be good for you!