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Make My Day Better is the charity arm of DialAFlight and the Lotus Group which supports a variety of projects around the world. The guiding principle is that the majority of the funding goes directly to the cause or the people.
Activities range from providing fishing boats for
Sri Lankan fishermen devastated by the Tsunami, to supporting a number of projects involving children in Africa. In addition we are financing cutting edge research into herbal medicine at the University of Westminster.
Polio is still prevalent in this part of
the world and Standproud runs a rehabilitation centre for children with the disease. Many children
with polio end up begging on the streets pushing themselves around on carts.
Standproud makes leg irons for them and teaches them to walk and regain their self esteem. They are then trained to make similar supports for the next arrivals.
We are supporting a children’s refuge in Eldoret, a deprived area outside Nairobi. This refuge takes in street children, many of whom lost their parents during the troubles five years ago. The refuge provides them with meals and somewhere to sleep.
In addition to supporting the refuge we have provided funding for them to start four small businesses in an attempt to become self financing.
DialAFlight was delighted to have the chance to help Sri Lankan victims of the 2004 Tsunami rebuild their lives by presenting a fleet of five lobster boats and five canoes to the people of Tangalle and Hambantota.
The firm’s MD Peter Stephens, flew
to Sri Lanka in 2005 to see them launched. It was a direct and practical way to help the economy of the region, with none of the money raised siphoned off by ‘administration’.
We have recently finished building an extension to the largest primary school in Lilongwe where class sizes can average 200.
At the end of May several of our staff will be travelling to Lilongwe to help with the final works.
Traditional medicine, which has been practised around the world for centuries, is undergoing a renaissance. Much of the understanding was forgotten in the West after the discovery of antibiotics which were thought to cure everything.
But there is now an increasing demand for natural alternatives to proprietary drugs which are in many cases based on herbs – aspirin comes from willow bark, vallium is based on valerian which grows in most gardens.
In April 2011 the Government announced that it was putting in a proper regulatory framework to regulate the use of alternative medicines and in future practitioners will need to be properly qualified. The University of Westminster is one of the leaders in the UK in the develop-ment and teaching of herbal medicine and we are funding two projects over the next four years to define best practice in herbal medicine.
We also contribute towards a number of other projects which include:
Make My Day Better is a registered charity (UK reg: 1139533)