About Raise a Smile

Raise a Smile is a non-profit English-German charity organization. We support children in various projects in Zambia (a developing country in Southern Africa). Our main focus is on education, as we believe that education is the most powerful tool that can be used to escape poverty. Through our commitment we work on your behalf to sustainably improve the lives of orphans and other vulnerable and underprivileged children.

The charity began in 2008 when two of our founding members returned from a trip to Zambia inspired and desperate to make a positive difference to the lives of the many children in Zambia that nobody else is going to help. The original idea of the charity was to financially support the existing projects we had already seen. The three projects we work with currently have a huge potential to succeed but without he necessary funding struggle to do so.

Raise a Smile e.V. Key Facts

Our long term plan, however, is to also start our very own project in Zambia. We are currently planning a school project which we hope to announce more details of in the near future. Often in developing countries such as Zambia schools attended by poor children have a considerably lower standard of education than those attended by the children of rich families. With this project we hope to offer underprivileged children a better chance in life by providing an education that does much more than just teaching them basic reading, writing and arithmetic.

Raise a Smile is a small non-profit charity organisation made up entirely of volunteers and with almost no administration costs to pay. Therefore, every single Pound, Euro or Dollar that you donate to Raise a Smile goes directly to our projects and therefore the people who need it most (except for a small amount of bank/PayPal fees).

Raise a Smile volunteers make regular trips to Zambia (at their own expense) to ensure all donations are spent wisely and so we can have an up to date picture of what is happening with the projects we support.

In addition to the projects we support in Zambia, we opened the Raise a Smile Hostel in Berlin in December 2009. The hostel is run on a non-profit basis so all the money we make is donated to the projects we support in Zambia.