Like the glorious Himalayan Griffon Vulture pictured hovering above one of our forests in south Nepal, we’re on a high following the Big Give’s Earth Raise campaign that ended at noon today.

Unfortunately, we’d didn’t quite reach our appeal target of £171,500, but that is to be expected in the current challenging economic times. And we always believe in aiming really high – perhaps a little too high in this appeal. BUT – when we combine online donations, pledges and Gift Aid (income tax reclaim) we still secured a remarkable £121,576 from a total of 243 donations.

In fact, little Pipal Tree raised the 17th most amount of funds from 338 participating charities.

Besides that, we have added 28 new names to our loyal band of discerning supporters. And there are other significant indirect spin-offs from the campaign like profile raising nationally, developing the supporter relationships that mean a lot to us as a very personal charity, and we now have some fantastic short films that we can embed in our website for long-term use.

Clearly, we will need to cut back on some of our project activities over the coming few months according to what we can afford, but, notwithstanding that, we will be able to allocated funds from Earth Raise to two new projects that will hopefully leverage additional major grants from major grantmakers. These include a £90,000 sewage-to-compost project  towards which we can contribute £10,000 and an €140,000 purchase of five new landsites for Miyawaki forests in south Nepal towards which we can allocate €40,000 of Earth Raise funding.

The other good news is that we have some last-minute pledges that were too late to incorporate into the main Earth Raise campaign but that have allowed us to set up a short follow on campaign. So, if you missed the chance to donate during the past week, you’re not too late to have a gift doubled in value. Perhaps in this way we can make up some of the shortfall in Earth Raise fundraising.

The donate button for this is below. Very many thanks.