‘Honest’- a charity to spread kindness, Canadinans Can Also Help, Badal Syed

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‘Honest’- a charity to spread kindness, Canadinans Can Also Help, Badal Syed

Honest’ is actually a charity shop which runs online and it has a show room cum office at Chattogram, Bangladseh too. This is almost a copy of Thrift store of Canada. (The only difference is, ‘Honest’ provides free goods too, which thrift store does not, possibly.)

Our theme is ‘ Stop selling- Start helping.’

17000 middle and lower middle class people are getting benefit from it.This is a new concept of business introduced by Syed Mohammad Abu Daud, a senior Government officer (Commissioner of Income Tax) by profession, but a social activist by passion. He is popularly known with his pen name ‘Badal Syed.’ He is one of the most popular writers of Bangladesh too.

  Honest is better to be described as a ‘Business for Humanity.’

Here the investors invest capital as charity; they do not take any single profit, and never take back the investment they made. It is their pure charity mission, by which they want to help others to get necessary goods at very nominal price or for free and thus try to cut the living expenses of the recipients.

The uniqueness of this project is, 60% profit of the sale proceed is distributed among the clients directly who purchase from this charity shop. Rest 40% profit is kept for operating expenses and charities.

The target group of this business is students and lower/ middle income groups. They become partner of this platform automatically just after their first purchase and get back 60% of the profit. In its memorandum of article, the purchasers are clearly mentioned as the partner of this charity house.

They (the clients, who are addressed as member) get a huge profit pay back from their daily needs purchase.

This concept is a new business concept, firstly introduced in Bangladesh.

Since inception in 2017, it has distributed almost two hundreds US dollars as profit to its members.

Moreover this platform has started a new segment called ‘Donate it forward.’

In this segment it offers necessary goods to needy people totally free of cost.

Besides, this project provides medical help to deserving candidates- free of cost. It has almost 17000 members now- who get regular benefits.

The project is mostly run by three means-

  1. Selling donated items at very nominal price. 2. Selling necessary goods at lesser price than then the market price, even at lesser than the cost price (the loss is born by the sponsor investors.) 3. Distributing free goods to them- who have not the purchasing capacity even at nominal price.

How profit is distributed?

We have devised a very simple but ‘sure shot’ method to distribute the profit.

It is given instantly at the time of making purchase.

Suppose a ‘tee shirt’ is sold at one dollar- the purchaser has a stake of 60% of this one dollar (since it is a donated item, honest has no cost price, so the whole one dollar is its profit.)

Since 60% profit belongs to the purchaser, he has to pay only 40 cents to honest- rest 60 cent (s) he will keep for him/herself as his/her slice of profit. So, there is no hassle, no confusion about getting profit. It is a matter of pushing the ‘ORDER’ button and profit is his or her.

This charity shop gets huge popularity in Bangladesh and sells a product in every eight minute on average. The minimum lead time is three seconds!)

The rest 40% profit kept by this project is spent for- 

  1. Scholarships to under privileged students.(We have almost 500 students in our payroll under a program named ‘Pay it forward’. 2. Free medical service to needy patients. our volunteers visit hospitals every day and find the helpless patients to stand beside them. We provide all related expenses for them. Till today we have helped almost 800 patients. 3. Distribution of free school bags full of stationaries.   4. Distribution of Free goods to needy people.   5. We run a ‘quality pass time’ lounge for senior citizens for free of cost. It is name ‘Parents’ Lounge.
  2. Operating expenses (Here work all University/College students and it helps them to meet their expenses.)
  3. Providing small capital to young and needy entrepreneurs.  8. We help meritorious students to go for exchange program in foreign universities. It does not include only Bangladeshi student, but foreign   student too. An afghan student has got our hand with her in this program. (She is from Asian Women University, Bangladesh.)

 How Canadians can help us? 

At first, please note that, Honest never accepts any cash donation. (Only sponsor investors make cash investment as charity.) It only accepts used/unused goods (but usable) only.

Collect different goods. Every essential like clothes, shoes, bags, belts, watches cosmetic, books, academic stationaries, home appliances – everything we do accept. Kind Canadian donors can run a drive to collect it for the whole year and can ask anyone who comes Bangladesh to carry an extra luggage full of those donations. We have a pick up system in every international airport of Bangladesh, so the carrier can drop that luggage at our pick up point (it is generally manned by our volunteers.) Please, not that we can pay the freight charges of extra luggage.

Usually I visit Canada in every July or August- so the goods can be handed over to me. I can carry four to five luggage  at a time at my cost.

If there are huge donations, we can have help from a NGO of Bangladesh to carry them by container without any tax at port stage by Bangladesh Government. This NGO has that privilege given to it by the Government of Bangladesh and happily ready to help us. In this case we shall bear freight charges, if necessary.