Seasonal Greetings

As we bid farewell to the year of 2007 and welcome the arrival of 2008, we are reflecting on the year of 2007 at Tendel Group. There has been a number of great undertakings that we want to share with you. We want to remind you of the joy and happiness that you as a donor have helped us to bring to many people in a far away country. So when you sit down with your family, please consider this as our 'thank you' gift to you for your support of Tendel's initiatives. We want to let you know that as a donor of Tendel Group, you have changed someone else's world and this is worthy cause.

To give you an idea of what we have been up to at Tendel, we need to start with an important event in Tendel's history and that is the official registration of Tendel Group as non for profit organization in the spring of 2007. With many days of endless paper work, we were finally granted the status of a 503(c) organization in the state of Kansas. This means that you can now send your donations directly to Tendel Group and get tax exemption. We are working hard to make your donation process as easy as possible. In terms of Tendel's operations, not much has changed. Even though there has been an increase in the number of projects that we do, the size of Tendel remains the same. We have three staff members and two board members. Without a central office, we are scattered all over the U.S. from Colorado, Amdo, Kansas to Washington D.C..

With this great start in the earlier spring, we had an amazing summer of many successful projects. In the education sector, we successfully carried out two different projects at two Tibetan primary schools. In Golok prefecture, the project delivered winter clothing, bedding and solar cookers to more than 65 students and provided 1,000 books of various sorts. In Malho, we provided basic educational supplies such as notebooks and chalks and we are also providing free lunches to more than 100 students for a whole year. These projects have solved immediate needs of many children of disadvantaged backgrounds. We also provided college scholarship to 12 young Tibetan students and helped them to pursue an education. In the sectors of community development and environment, we provided solar cookers to more than 100 households, provided a mill and noodle maker for an entire village. With more than 6 different projects benefiting more than 1,000 individuals directly, we are happy to call it a great year at Tendel. We would like to extend our warmest wishes and thanks to you for being part of this wonderful journey. To find out more information about each of these individual projects, please visit our projects section .

While we celebrate the success of these projects, we also look forward to another year of exciting projects. We continue what we have started with the scholarship program and initiate new projects that address urgent issues that Tibetan communities face. With the school year of 2008, we are expecting to expand our current program to include 8 more students and help them with their college tuition. We provide funding to those who excel academically and include more that are in desperate need of help. On the primary school level, we continue our financial support of the students at Golok Primary School. We will provide food, clothing and educational supplies to these students while seeking a permanent solution to their housing needs.

Apart from education, we also hope to work on a number of projects that address people's concerns about the environment. After our great success with our first experimental tree project, we are convinced and confident that growing more trees is the only way to solve their immediate problems. While the benefits and needs of growing trees is becoming more obvious and critical in recent global climatic context, trees are vital in stabilizing and protecting the local land. As the village is located on a steep mountain slope, the growing valleys created by runaway water from the mountains threaten the very existence of many family compounds. The trees will also reclaim the eroding land around the village and provide a greener environment for them to live in. Future harvesting of the trees will also become a new source of income for the families.

Besides these projects, we also have a solar cooker project that aims to provide 100 cookers to 100 families. Solar cookers have always been the cornerstone of Tendel Group for they are affordable, beneficial, eco-friendly and empowering. We have delivered more than 2,000 solar cookers to date. With $25 we can purchase one brand new solar cooker and deliver to a needy family that will use it for the next 15 years. This is the most straightforward project of all and we encourage you to sponsor many solar cookers as their benefits are immediate.

We hope you will support our initiatives and stand with us on these important issues. You can learn more about these individual projects here. If you decide to support a particular project, please make your request explicit when sending your check and we will honor it. Please write to us to find out more about the different ways that both individuals and organizations or companies can get involved. However, if supporting us financially is beyond your means, please spread around the good news. We also encourage you to bookmark our website and return for periodic updates from us. With this note, we will now let you explore other parts of our websites or let you return to whatever doing you were engaged in.

We wish you a new year of great health and happiness!