About Us

A Dollar-A-Day Program Donation Information

Target Earth Resources

Our a Dollar-a-Day fund at Target Earth brings in approximately $60,000.00 per year. Your gift to that fund helped to build a community based Armenia Development Center in Belize over this past year, and is funding the cost of keeping that humble center open -- the salary of a Belizean staff member, some library books, chairs for community meetings, materials for literacy and health training, and supplies for simple but delicious hospitality meals. The cost of building and operating the center is more than the funds that come in through a Dollar-a-Day, but we are able to make up that difference with additional donations, grants and volunteer help. Our hope for the a Dollar-a-Day program is that it will be able to fund the overhead expenses of coordinating these volunteer efforts. The real cost of building the Armenia Development Center was materials (approximately $70,000.00) and labor (approximately $30,000.00 -- most of it donated) plus the Target Earth staff in Belize who managed the onsite program and the Target Earth staff in the US who recruited and managed the volunteers. We would like to take on as many local community projects as possible, and we believe a Dollar-a-Day could help us find and place volunteers to work with our indigenous partners all over the world.

In addition to our a Dollar-a-Day fund, we go to donors for general and targeted gifts that help us in the work of serving the earth and the poor. Our total annual donations come to approximately $430,000.00. Target Earth is not a large corporate structure with floors of offices. We are a very slim, small, careful organization that has a total annual income of 1.5 million dollars. Our volunteer programs (where folk go out into communities that live on less than a dollar a day), and our academic programs in the South Pacific and Belize, are self-funded through participant fees. We fund our administrative costs with an overhead fee we charge on all of our programs, and through our fundraising. All of the costs we incur in the upkeep of our buildings in Belize are funded through specific grants and donations, and all the staff costs at Jaguar Creek are funded through program fees and designated gifts that help us run Jaguar Creek.

A partner organization of ours that provides drinking water in North Africa recently told us that the largest cost in delivering water to the villages are the pipes that carry the water. The faucet at the end of the pipe and local staff expenses are a small part of the total cost of delivering this life sustaining water. I suppose those of us who ask the public to help fund our programs always feel a little insecure about asking for donations to cover the cost of the pipe and staff as well as the faucet that lets the water free, but obviously we need to. At Target Earth we are blessed with donors who help us over the entire span of the delivery system. In the past we have built homes, opened organic farms, put in water systems in deserts, planted indigenous crops for waterless communities, started tree nurseries and funded health clinics. Thanks for being a part of our vital work.

Gordon Aeschliman
President