Upcoming Projects
Breakfast Club Expansion
The already successful New Westminster School District Breakfast Club program will be expanded into the Vancouver area in the coming months. Sidoo Family Giving has meetings scheduled with the Vancouver School Board to put this initiative into action.
Steve Nash Foundation
Sidoo Family Giving has provided funding toward a forthcoming Steve Nash Foundation workshop program for elementary and middle school teachers to recognize signs of child abuse. More details to come as the program gets underway!
India Village Life Improvement Project
Sidoo Family Giving has elected to give back to communities in India by providing clean water and sanitation to areas that were otherwise lacking. “We are very interested in giving back to the communities and areas that are dear to our hearts,” said David Sidoo.
Funds will be directed to a village in the area of the Sidoo family origins. The project is expected to move forward in 2012.
The program is run through a New Westminster, BC based organization called Indo-Canadian Friendship Society of British Columbia (ICFSBC). For more than ten years, the organization has spearheaded several Village Life Improvement Projects in the Punjab area of India for which the Punjab government has provided matching funds.
As of 2011, ICFSBC will have upgraded 14 villages with an underground sewage system, piped clean water with access to each household, paved roads, solar street lighting and a sewage treatment plant. Some will also have computer services, including education, and a community centre. The two main cities near the villages completed in Punjab are Jullunder and Phagawara.
Punjab has a population of 20 million. Typical villages lack clean piped drinking water and there is no management of the wastewater. Open drains with raw sewage are an invitation to flies and mosquitoes, and innumerable diseases. Computer education in the villages is non-existent. Other civic amenities taken for granted in the west are non-existent.
Source: ICFSBC
Additional program goals include creating parks and a playground; planting trees in and around the village; establishing an underground telephone and electrical system where possible and teaching the benefits of good hygiene, sanitation, computer knowledge and environment.
Studies indicate that the impact of the Village Life Improvement Projects is significant including improved health – the decrease or elimination of 30% of infectious and parasitic diseases which are totally absent or rare in the developed world; and, increased productivity – development of computer skills, improved agriculture knowledge, increased connectivity to the rest of India and the world.
