We’re a small organization in our first year with a small budget. We’ll be submitting normal accounts at the end of the year. But it’s not easy to read accounts without training, and it seemed we should give an account of where the money has come from and gone.

Unless otherwise specified, all values are in Euros.

Current Balance

We maintain an account with Bunq bank in the Netherlands.

As of Sept 25, 2022, we had 5273 euros in the bank: 1193.7 in ‘incomings’, 158.66 in admin, 87.32 in operations, 1601 in savings, and 1432 set aside for Eden House.

Eden House particularly needs stable funding, hence the relatively large amount set aside for it. We’ve just spent 4804 setting up and operating our first 7 weeks, so this fund is currently depleted.

We never know when someone won’t be let on a plane or we’ll be approached by someone who needs moved NOW. So we set aside a relatively large amount for savings, and currently have 1601 in that account.

Like any organization we have administrative expenses (bank charges, IT charges) and have 158 set aside for anticipated expenses. We transfer money from incomings to Operations as a fiscal control measure, and fund operations from the Operations account.

Income

We have raised 32923 euros to date.

Most of our income has come from small individual contributors. Our largest contribution has been the initial 3000 euro donation from an individual that started us.

We have received no grants or corporate donations.

We received a 2500 euro interest free loan from one of our board members to help get started. This money isn’t included in the above figure, and was used to incorporate and obtain ANBI status.

Google now provides us with a graph.

Expenditures

It can take us a long time to get a passenger out. For this reason the largest item is ‘support’ – sending frightened trans folk money to stay alive while on the run, and renting rooms in dodgy places. Eden House has been an attempt to reduce this cost.
Sometimes we’ve had to hold people somewhere simply because we didn’t have the funds to get them out. So this also inflates this number.
This number also includes some items we’d rather not describe because it would compromise our methods.
We spent 13485 on support.

Passenger travel is what we love to spend on – airline tickets, trains, and other transport. We spent 5153 on passenger travel. A separate category for ‘passenger paperwork’, we spent 162 euros on such items as passport charges.

Eden House has been our next largest expenditure. The 4804 investment is already greatly increasing our capacity to help people in East Africa and other places. Moving forward, we’ll spend 800-1000 euros a month for the next few months until self sufficiency programs kick in.

Sometimes we need to send a volunteer somewhere to physically help someone escape. These are often quite dangerous. We spent 1926 on staff travel.

We had charges of 553 for admin and 826 for IT. The large IT charge was because we were setting up systems, because we paid for TransEmigrate’s IT charges while TransAsylias was getting separated, and because it took us a while to be registered with Google for their Google for Nonprofits program.

Our only fundraising expense was 150 euros. We had a tent at “May Contain Hackers”, a ‘hacker camp’. This was an opportunity to ride along on activities a board member had to do anyway for their day job. While not a great success as a fundraiser, we developed many useful contacts.

We recently hired Arya Aurora for a combination role of Eden House manager and PR assistant. She’s been learning the PR role, but is already doing great work as house manager. Her salary is 250 euros/month, consistent with market rates for office worker jobs in Kenya.

There is a 340 euro discrepency in these figures. I believe it’s due to some refund, but since this post is not intended as a formal financial report, I’m simply going to acknowledge it and return to moving passengers.

What We’ve Done

In the past 9 months we’ve

• Moved 18 people – some of them only partially
• Helped another 6 survive while we figure out how to get them out
• We are trying to help 4 more
• Started Eden House
• Started a program to advise people in non-emergency places like the US and UK how to get out
• We had a program of emotional support for QTI folks stuck in dangerous places, run by a social worker, but we no longer have that resource.
• Raised awareness of conditions for QTI folks outside EU/US

We feel like we’ve been good stewards of your donations. We do thank you for your ongoing, amazing support.

Header image based on photograph of Emirates Airliner by Arcturus~commonswiki used CC-by-CA-3.0