Helping the Children of Tohoku APRICOT News #2

The rainy season it seems has done nothing to dampen the spirits of APRICOT’s supporters. Thanks to the growing number of Team APRICOT Children volunteers,we have been very productive and positive for APRICOT, one that has seen us take a major step towards official NPO status (as a registered NPO 法人) and move closer to unveiling our new website.

With a board of directors now in place, we have been able to submit the paperwork for our official application to become an NPO. The directors we have assembled come from a diverse range of backgrounds, from experienced licensed mental health professionals to people from the worlds of finance, creative media and other walks of life, but all share a desire to support the wellbeing of children in Tohoku over the long road to recovery that still lies ahead.

With NPO status hopefully secured within the next two months, we can then step up our activities to build awareness, provide support and raise crucial funding for other mental health NPOs and groups working on the ground with children in the Tohoku region. One of the very first things we will do once APRICOT is officially recognized as an NPO 法人is activate a Paypal Japan account, enabling people to donate from within Japan and overseas without needing to deal with complicated bank transfers and bank charges.

At the same time, we will also be launching a completely new APRICOT website in Japanese and English. Besides being smarter, the new website will also be a portal through which we will share information and articles on the work being done by various NPOs and other groups in Tohoku – a place where we hope we can highlight initiatives and stories that so often go unseen, especially from outside of Japan. If you would like to sign up to receive these stories and our monthly newsletters by email when they are published, please send an email to teamapricotchildren@gmail.com with “newsletter” in the subject.

To learn more about APRICOT, please visit our soon-to-be revamped website: http://apricotchildren.org

If you would like to donate, please visit our Donations page. To see how some of the donations raised in 2013 were spent, please go to http://apricotchildren.org/en/info/2013KH/index.html.

note: APRICOT Newsletters are written by Andrew Grimes and fellow members of the APRICOT team. They are exclusively reproduced here on Deep Japan with the express permission of Andrew Grimes. © APRICOT with all rights reserved".