This year’s Maovember, our tenth annual campaign, started last weekend with an event–the Dog Pub Crawl–that captures our spirit of fun and fundraising.

Maovember started as a spur-of-the-moment fundraiser and evolved into a yearly ritual with a shifting and eccentric lineup of events, from beer pong, corn toss and poker tournaments to live music, dance and wine tasting parties to walk-a-thons and bar crawls featuring themes such as wine, craft beer and BYOD–Bring Your Own Dog.

The focus is on giving 100 percent of revenue to a good cause, with admin costs covered by volunteers. And to good causes that can show visible results that we, in turn, can show to our donors. That has meant everything from funding a delivery van for a bakery that employs people with osteogenesis to funding cataract surgeries for the elderly in rural area to funding reading rooms for schools in need across China.

This year’s tenth-anniversary Maovember logo is gold and silver. The design was fine-tuned by Andres Vargas, with Claudia Masueger of CHEERS printing it for our stickers and Jasmine Kho of Kakikopi and Mulu funding several giant versions. Thanks to them and to the many others out there who have helped Maovember to help good causes.

Maovember 2019 is about to start and we are backing one of our veteran partners once again: The Libary Project. Since being established in 2006, TLP has furnished books, tables, chairs, shelves et al — libraries — in over 2,000 rural schools in China. TLP has a long track record of teaming up with individual donors, smalls campaigns like ours and big corporations. It is fully registered in China, something that is increasingly important for those raising and donating funds.

I’ll also post an update soon on how our last campaign’s funds were spent. That includes our efforts with bakery Bread of Life and equipment we funded, including industrial clothes driers, printers and a specially made wheelchair from Germany. I’m just waiting to hear from Bread of Life on one last item. That update will also cover The Library Project, which also did a review this year of some previous libraries we funded.

We are a bit behind on organizing this year and right now need to focus on confirming our event lineup and getting through opening weekend, which features our launch party this Friday at Hulu and our 42-km “mao-a-thon” this Saturday in Ritan Park.

One request from 2017 Maovember partner Bread of Life Bakery, which employs working-age orphans with brittle-bone disease, was a new delivery vehicle. We soon discovered buying a vehicle was one thing the scarcity and cost of the Beijing license needed for deliveries in the city quite another.

Then we lucked out. New Bread of Life manager John Bison met someone who was selling his Honda and Beijing plates and, because he liked the bakery, willing to get them go for the bargain price of USD5,000 or RMB34,300. Deal done!

Bison brought the vehicle to Paddy O’Shea’s, a Maovember supporter since year one and site of our closing parties. He’s seen sharing some of Bread of Life’s much-loved carrot cake with co-owner Paul Rochon.

You can also catch it, perhaps wearing a giant moustache, at the Maovember 2018 launch party at XL Bar & Restaurant on November 1. The vehicle is part of our mission to show visible results from our fund-raising. Look for more posts in the coming days and wees about the bakery equipment for Bread of Life and the reading rooms for Library Project that Maovember funded over the past year.

The fifth annual Maovember, slated for November 1 through November 30, will support a pair of very worthy causes.

We are connecting with Bread of Life for the first time. This project trains and employs disabled orphans to work in a bakery that serves many Beijing businesses and customers and has received kudos for its quality, especially its carrot cake and pies.

We are also teaming again with The Library Project, with whom we worked during our inaugural campaign in 2013 as well as in 2016. The Library Project has furnished more than 1,000 reading rooms in needy schools across China.

Want to support Maovember? Learn how here.

And here are a few photos from a reading room Maovember sponsored in September in Hebei province: