Halad Turns 1!

Here Are All The Successes & Mistakes We Made In Year 1

From the first time we ran free health education lessons in classrooms…had a heap of fun and then forgot to get feedback🙋🏻

Year 1 at Halad has exceeded our expectations by a long mile! We started this passion project (which was yet to be given a name) to try make a difference in global health inequality at the end of the last decade… and turned it into a rising NGO by the beginning of this one.

We love taking the time to celebrate our wins, no matter how big or small. But also love learning from our mistakes … and trust me, we’ve made a tonne of them!

In Year 1 at Halad:

We ran 4 sensational mission trips
Took 28 select student volunteers from Australia over to Valencia City, Philippines.

Our first official Health Fair at Valencia National High School was hectic!

Where they taught over 4,100+ local students with our Health Fair Campaigns in local high schools…
and reached over 500+ community members with our Health Education Lectures in local healthcare facilities.
Which you can watch here.

Working from the backend:

We grew our Australian Team to 8 dedicated team members (who are all incredible Halad Alumni coming back to do more) and…

The beautiful people behind Halad.

On the ground:

We grew our local Valencia Team to 5 ridiculously hardworking team members who make mission trips possible.

And more beautiful people behind Halad in Philippines.

And we’re so proud to have funded all this impactful work through raising over $10K+ from our events and GAMSAT services.

But numbers truly don’t do the mammoth effort we put in and the impact we make justice, and instead we love showing just a glimpse of what beautiful messages the people we reach share with us on the daily:

This was a handmade card that one of our Grade 5 students, Yosef, made the night after him and his peers received lessons on dengue prevention, personal hygiene and dental health from our Halad volunteers…

Only recently did we find out that Yosef and his peers have actually been continuing to use our teaching materials to teach his school mates from classes who missed out on receiving lessons from our Halad volunteers.

And this was a message sent to us by one of the Year 11 students almost immediately after we taught him and his friends about depression and mental health.

Just the other day someone asked us what our biggest success was last year and as I sit here writing this after leaving a team meeting at 10pm…

It’s definitely the infectious culture of giving back that we’ve built.

We don’t ask our team to work every spare hour, but they willingly do and stay to contribute until the wee hours of the nights — doing whatever it takes to make things happen so that we can make and sustain our impact.

They see the true value of what we could create together and treat each other like brothers and sisters through with endless, eternal roasting.

It’s a culture of loving your neighbour, whether they are sitting beside you, across the table or in a classroom miles away… half way across the world.

It’s a culture of stewardship and sharing our blessings because we can give back.

That is what we’re most proud of building and something that will never change.

But we wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere close to where we are today without making a tonne of mistakes (now this list is endless, so we shortlisted them to the top 3).

Donation Dealing Gone Wrong

When we started this “passion project” at the beginning of 2019, we actually began by physically bringing and shipping medical donations to under resourced hospitals. It was only after we had packed all the supplies, paid for the shipping and sent it over, did we find out it was low-key illegal and our donations were stuck in customs.

That day ended with us literally begging the customs lady to release the supplies and little to say…that was the end of that — for good.

Forgot To Collect Feedback

By mission trip #2, we knew we couldn’t provide free medical supplies anymore so we figured we could trial providing free health education in classrooms. After an entire week of busting our chops getting the teaching material down and delivering it to 600+ students in a day, someone asked how did it go?

…and we objectively couldn’t answer that question because we forgot to collect any feedback! Doh!

Now, things look very different with feedback meticulously collected and tracked at every lesson.

Hitting Fundraising Fatigue Real Quick

When we committed to providing free health education lessons for thousands of students, we realised we needed funds to make that happen as logistical costs were starting to stack up.

We had a massive hit with a first few fundraising events with a terrific turn out. Did the same event again… and almost no one showed up.

Clear lesson learned that we couldn’t rest on our laurels doing the same old thing. We went back to the drawing board and now fund our missions through the GAMSAT services we’ve created, which are selling out like hotcakes!

Looking back, it’s insane how much progress, pivots and impact we made in the short span of these first 12 months!
We never shy away from the fact that we were honestly just a bunch of university students looking that make a difference at the start of all of this and now we’re on track to doing just that.

Year 1 at Halad was all about figuring out what impact we could make and…

Year 2 at Halad is shaping into scaling that impact and making it sustainable.

In Valencia City, Philippines: we’re already expanding our Health Fair campaigns to more schools and creating leadership roles for students we reach to be trained as ambassadors, team members and locals who deliver our material to teach their own community.

In Melbourne, Australia:
we’re creating a suite of effective and affordable GAMSAT Services for students to be best prepared for future medical studies and pooling these funds straight into our health education campaigns overseas.

For the year that has been, we truly thank our sponsors and collaborators for all the support they’ve provided along the way to help make what we do possible:
Rotary Clubs of (Manningham, Greater Anonas, Central Bukidnon), Tastepoint, OBICHEM-CEOC, Encyte, King Wood Mallesons, The Generator, Monash Biomed Society.

Always feel free to reach out via info@haladtohealth.org.

Eliza Li & Wilh Jacobin,
Co-founders, Halad to Health