My Nonprofit Reviews

I have worked with this foundation as an outside advisor almost from its inception so I have a highly detailed (if possibly biased) view of how it operates. It started out as a personal effort to help young girls in Bali go to school and avoid a life of standing in rice paddies all day. Initially, the effort was focused on a single organization and funded entirely by the founder.

After seeing how getting an education transformed these girls lives, the founder decided to scale up his efforts to other countries in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand. In each country, he has recruited local sponsors for his projects, selecting trustworthy individuals who already had projects in place and were in a position to extend their work to aid more children. But he didn’t just drop money on them; he spent many days on site over repeated visits, providing business consulting on how to organize their projects, measure their progress, and increase their impact over time. My own view is that, as valuable as the funding is to client organizations, it’s the hands-on business guidance that is most responsible for his successes.

Over the ensuing years, the founder had expanded his team to bring additional expertise on the ground and to solicit charitable contributions to supplement his own spending. Yet he still does everything on a pro bono bias; at no point has he taken any compensation for his efforts, and when he has to pay people for their services, he takes the funds from his own wallet. This makes the SE Asia Foundation one of the few charitable organizations I’ve ever seen with zero percent overhead; every dollar that is contributed to this fund goes directly to the people it helps.

If you have the opportunity to work with this organization, I strongly encourage you to do so. It serves a great cause and it carries out its mission efficiently and effectively.