CowFund Gift Cows

• Find out all about our Gift Cow package Gift Cows (89KB PDF file)
  • View the Gift Cow Certificate
    • View the exclusive iron-on Gift Cow T-Shirt Transfer

CowFund Merchandise

Are you able to find a market for quality coffee cups, shirts, water bottles? CowFund will arrange delivery of quality items to your school, team, group or club for cost price (including postage). Sale of those items within your networks with a slight margin attached will provide sufficient funds to ‘purchase’ your very own Daisy Bell from us. Below is a table of suggested item amounts and margins to sell your way to CowFund immortality.

Item	Number	Cost (inc post)	per Item Cost	Rec Margin	Sale Price	Return	Moo Money
CowFund Coffee Cups	200	$ 640.00*	$ 3.20*	$ 1.75	$ 4.95*	$ 990.00	$ 350.00
CowFund Water Bottles	tba	tba	tba	tba	tba	tba	tba
CowFund Travel Mugs	tba	tba	tba	tba	tba	tba	tba

* example only - actual prices to be negotiated with supplier

Email tmo@cowfund.org for further information.

We’re gluttons for punishment. We can’t get enough of Dencorub and deodorant.

Welcome to ‘The Cow From Snowy River’, a major cycling fundraiser being undertaken by the CowFund team in October 2008.

Cowfunders will return to the highest point on mainland Australia and set out on a 590km journey via the Snowy River and country Victoria to Melbourne - arriving at Albert Park 6 days later.

“The Cow From Snowy River”

• One page summary of CowFund
• CowFund - Ethical Considerations

Are you looking for a guest speaker for an upcoming meeting of your social, sporting or community organisation? If so, we’d love for you to consider inviting us to chew the cud.

The CowFund team hang out primarily in Sydney, with members in Darwin, Newcastle, Melbourne and Tasmania. We’ll happily attend meetings in those places to talk about CowFund and the benefits being delivered by our partners. Just be prepared for some hat-passing and can-rattling on behalf of the cause.

If you’d like to discuss the potential for a CowFunder to address your meeting, please contact Danny Russell by e-mail at tmo@cowfund.org.

We aren’t all pretty - but we’re pretty passionate!

Puzzled about how to Cow?

Want to raise funds for CowFund at your company, school, church, business or service club? These resources should help you put the ‘fun’ into fundraising.

Info Kits

• CowFund At A Glance
• CowFund PowerPoint Presentation
• DVD (watch it here on YouTube), or e-mail tmo@cowfund.org to request a copy

Screensavers, Wallpaper and Other Stuff

• A Hand Up … (21kB jpg file)
• Milky Way (21kB jpg file)
• Rawhide (21kB jpg file)
• Floyd (21kB jpg file)
• Fundamental (21kB jpg file)
• Cowbar (21kB jpg file)
• Cowbar (656kB screensaver)
• E.S.E (687kB screensaver)
• World Policitcal History - A Bovine Perspective (36kB pdf file)
• Befriend A Cow For Free!  Open Facebook here and search for “Bo Vine” (he’s the cool-looking dude in sunglasses on page 3 of the search results).  Join Bo’s growing list of Facebook friends and help promote CowFund.

Donations

It costs roughly AUD $350 to purchase a cow in Asia - an amount beyond the reach of most families living below the poverty line.

Donate $350 or more and you can nominate a name for ‘your’ cow, which will then be listed in the Club Moo section of this web site. Or if you don’t want to donate a whole cow, we’ll accept any contribution at all… rump, udders, tail… it all helps.

You can donate online below, or if prefer a more traditional method, print out a CowFund Donation Form and post it with your cheque or money order made out to:

Grameen Foundation Overseas Aid Fund - CowFund
PO Box 495
NORTH SYDNEY NSW 2059

Receipts

Donations over $2 are tax deductible. CowFund is auspiced by Grameen Foundation Overseas Aid Fund. Donations are processed and official receipts sent out by the Grameen team within 21 days.

Grameen Foundation of Australia

CowFund has been made possible by the assistance, advice, guidance and support offered by the Grameen Foundation of Australia in Sydney. You guys are the best. What else can we say?

Mr. X, Web Designer

Web sites don’t get much better than this - we love CMS! Thanks to the talented Mr. X (we can’t show you his face… even though he’s not a dentist) for his pro bono professionalism and dedication, way beyond the call of duty.

Timoer Nugroho, Web Designer

Three betas in three years - thanks Timoer, we still love you.

Our current partners in Asia are:

• International Development Foundation, Bangladesh
• Grameen Koota, India
• Maha Bhoga Marga, Bali, Indonesia
• Kantha Shakthi, Sri Lanka

The program models delivered by CowFund’s Asia partners differ from country to country - but all provide an opportunity for needy families to benefit from microcredit initiatives, often involving the provision of cows and other livestock and the development of small business opportunities.

CowFund supports organisations which provide non-sectarian humanitarian assistance in Asia. Although in some cases our partners have religious affiliations, their humanitarian work reaches a broad spectrum of the communities in which they operate.

Still got questions about CowFund? Review our FAQ …

Microcredit (sometimes referred to as microfinance) is a term used to describe a range of financial services that cater to the needs of people - often the poor and marginalised - who are alienated from traditional lending institutions like banks.

Microcredit usually focuses upon small loans, small repayments and activities which immediately generate income from skills already possessed by the borrower. Since it was first pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in the 1970s, micro-credit has enabled millions of people in developing countries (particularly women) to become self-reliant.

The UN General Assembly designated 2005 as the International Year of Microcredit , while in 2006, Grameen Bank founder Professor Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to create economic and social development from below”. See the Nobel Prize Committee’s web site for further information.

For further information on microcredit, click here to review an excerpt from David Bornstein’s ‘The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank ‘. (Reproduced with permission of The Grameen Foundation of Australia.)

What are the benefits of microcredit?

Successful microcredit initiatives serve to:

• Give the poor access to much-needed financial services (e.g. small loans, insurance, savings plans), empowering participants to gain more control over their lives and earning capacities.This promotes sustainable livelihoods and reduces the vulnerability of poor households through asset creation and the generation of immediate income.
• Forge community alliances, particularly amongst women, of personal and professional support, e.g. ’self-help’ groups which mobilize savings and become forums for discussing both business and other social issues, such as health, education and human rights.
• Encourage savings, to establish a ’safety net’ for the future. This benefits households, families and communities via improvements in nutrition and health, education and economic resilience.

CowFund was formed in 2004 by a group of diverse Australians, brought together by the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship, an ‘ethics in leadership’ program managed by the St James Ethics Centre in Sydney. Meet the Aussie team:

‘Fi Fi’
Fiona Higgins (NSW) CowFund Coordinator. Fiona has a day job in philanthropy and a penchant for distance cycling, marathon-running, poetry and pinot noir. When she’s not writing dodgy prose about the Australian outback, she moonlights as an Indonesian translator and MBA nerd.

‘TMO’
Danny Russell (TAS) - CowFund Communications Manager. Danny is an extraordinarily fortunate father and husband, a spectacularly unsuccessful angler, and someone from whom you should NEVER accept punting tips. Danny is a proud islander with a perhaps-too-active interest in the affairs of Australia’s archipelago state. Vocationally, Danny is a slow learner; having started his working life as a police officer and retaining that status to this day.

‘Megsy’
Megan Boazman (VIC). Megsy is an international woman of mystery. As a senior executive with one of Australia’s largest property design houses, Megsy pulls off a work/life balance involving steel-capped stilettos, a hectic social calendar and the odd spot of painting. She has an incurable fetish for chairs, an insatiable appetite for duck, and a habit of breaking hearts (inadvertently…).

‘Mikey’
Michael Murray (NSW). What’s an intelligent, ethically sensitive New Age Guy doing in the world of funds management? Making a mozza in Socially Responsible Investment, that’s what. When Mikey’s not charming the trousers off co-workers and comrades alike, he’s striking a pose (yoga asanas, of course) or cooking up a storm in his seaside terrace.

‘Heids’
Heidi Snell (NT). Two cats, one husband, one beautiful daughter Grace and a career in consumer protection. In the seven remaining minutes of a given day, Heids loves producing fashion lines on her sewing machine, embracing tropical Darwin life with her four generational family, cooking whilst reading, reading about cooking and of course cycling with bovine benevolence.

‘Stevo’
Dr Steven Golding (NSW). Is there a doctor in the house? Steve Golding splits his time between medical administration, occupational medicine and his family in the Hunter and New England areas of NSW. On a ho-hum day this involves educating doctors in training, developing their careers and ensuring that your train drivers are safe to work.

‘Tessa’
Theresa Brungs (NSW). Tessa is an expert at sorting the chaff from the wheat, taking the bull by the horns, and rocking the proverbial boat. As a high school teacher with a strong interest in spirituality and religiosity, she’s a lethal combination of iron fist in a velvet glove. On weekends, she enjoys downtime with her family and bonding with her Combi Van.

‘Nath’
Nathan Fabian (NSW). With that disarming smile, who wouldn’t sign their life away to Nathan ‘Smoothy’ Fabian? Nathan’s eclectic background in management consultancy, international relations, politics and corporate social responsibility consistently helps to Keep The CowFund Bastards Honest. And we love it - Nath’s roughest whipping feels like a gentle caress.