THE JASPER PROJECT

Young students in Japan start their own micro-aid program.
A group of boys and girls at the American School in Tokyo, Japan, made a decision: they want to support MgM by adopting a sniffer dog. They very succesfully are raising funds for a new young dog to be trained to find mines. The dog doesn't know yet but his name is already chosen. Follow the story of a dog named Jasper: how it all begins…
(Here the students themselves describe their idea and how they started this project.)

The project objective is to raise money through a variety of activities facilitated at the American School in Japan Middle School with both student and faculty participation. Note As of March 1 2005 we have donated 600 U$ to the organization.
Classes are encouraged to raise money to clear equivalent areas in the school to areas with landmines by then donating money to Landmine Organizations.
Each class which participates then is encouraged to share their knowledge of the Landmine issue with another class, and help them raise money themselves through class activities to then go to another class to continue expanding the program.
The main organization we are focusing on and working with at this time is the Menschen gegen Landminen People Against Landmines, a non governmental organization out of Germany which actively trains people, dogs, supplies, educates, funds and demines landmines around the globe.

How we decided on this project:
Everyone in Mr. Mikton's advisory brought in a sheet of paper with ideas of charities that we could give money to. Then we voted on the best idea and we chose to Clear landmines. We thought that clearing landmines is a good place to donate money to because people get hurt from landmines, especially children. We also have read a lot about this in our classes, and seen lots of ads about this. We thought we wanted to support something that actively tried to find solutions. Once we decided on the Landmines focus, we contacted various organizations around the globe. We wanted our money just to end up in a charity, but see it in action, that is working to solve the problem. We liked the Menschen gegen Landminen People Against Landmines criteria for their project.  We do feel sorry for all the people that get hit with a landmine so we decided to help with this organization.

How we have raised monies:
To expand our project, we made a power point explaining what we are doing and where our money is going. After a couple weeks  researching information form the internet, we created the actual power point, and we finally presented it to advisories, other groups of students.  We have a poster that Mr. Reckord our 7th Grade Social Studies teacher gives out to rooms that raise enough money, making them landmine free. Our PowerPoint was to get people to raise awareness and also if they donated money, their room become landmine free. The money and room represented an equivalent area which will be cleared of landmines. The group/classes we presented too were interested and  helping us raise money. One advisory sponsored a dance : Halloween dance which then raised $300.00 extra dollars.

Bake sale:
How we have raised money is we have done bake sales.  Each member of our advisory baked cakes or sweets and then   brought in 12  each and we sold them during our lunch break to other students.   We sold every single treat for 100 yen. Also at the bake sale table we sold T-Shirts for 1000yen. In total we made $450 from the bake sale!

Landmine T-shirt:
My family and I went to Cambodia on are Thanksgiving break. Mr. Mikton and Mr. Reckord came up with the idea of selling t-shirt highlighting the Landmine issue in Cambodia as a way to fund the project.  My family and I in Angkor Waht found a seller of these t-shirts. We bought fifty Land mine T shirts which I then brought to our advisory, these have been sold during the bake sale, quite succesfully.

Choosing the Dog:
We were given a long list of names from MgM and then spent a couple days chatting about the dogs names, and what people liked. This was followed up by a vote with students picking Jasper.

Next steps:
Our next step is to send our monies to MgM, and then continue with the bake sales/t-shirt sales. We also plan to target a few other advisories with our PowerPoint in an effort to increase awareness of this issue and ways others can support the clearing of landmines.

The American School in Japan
Contact person:
1-1-1 Nomizu | Chofu-shi | Tokyo 182-0031 Japan
Tel: (81) 422-34-5300
www.asij.ac.jp

You can order information from MgM here:

To be continued......