About
Blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting
Meet the team
I started Respite International as a 3rd year medical student at the University of Manchester. I was born in the UAE but I grew up spending several years in the UK, Pakistan, and the UAE. I am now a junior doctor working in England.
Starting a charitable organisation was an idea a decade in the making. The reason, more importantly, was to help people MYSELF so that I could ensure help was to be given adequately and transparently.
I was born in Iraq, I grew up in Jordan and Oman. I studied medicine at the University of Manchester. I am now a junior doctor working in England.
Seeing the great work performed by Respite International both locally and internationally, I was determined to jump in to help expand projects to the Middle East. One thing that really appealed to me was the 100% purchase policy. I would love to hear from you on any project suggestions you have, use the Contact page to get in touch.
What is a 'Jannah Coupon'?
We are registered with the Companies House as a Community Interest Company (CIC registration no.15586287) which is a not a charity but rather a limited company set up solely to benefit the general public. We have to publish our accounts yearly and we are regulated by the CIC regulator. A CIC has various pros and cons compared to a registered charity, ultimately we decided to proceed as a CIC.
As we are not a charity, we cannot accept donations, hence we came up with an idea where we provide a product that can be purchased for specific amounts. That product is called a 'Jannah Coupon'.
Although you will recieve a physical coupon upon purchase, a Jannah Coupon is fictitious and intended to remind us that the charitable causes you fund will push your scales on the Day of Judgement towards entering Jannah. As an Islamic organisation, our goal is to seek the pleasure of Allah through helping the poor and needy, and we can help each other reach that goal.
Once we receive your funds, we send out a Jannah Coupon in the post (UK only). We use your 100% of your funds towards the charitable project that you had chosen. No member of our team receives a salary or compensation of any sort.
What does a '100% purchase policy' really mean?
Let's be honest, it's not easy to define what this means nor is it without it's criticism.
Let's take a simple example of feeding 100 homeless people a hot meal each. Cost of ingredients are £100. We collect funds and are charged £3 by our donation platform. It costs £20 to hire a cook. We purchase 100 tin foil containers and 100 spoons for £10. On top of the above, we pay yearly fees for our website, domain name, design software, and charity email address that the project indirectly relies upon, totalling approximately £7 proportionate to the relative size of this project compared to our other projects in the year.
Total project cost is £140. So what exactly is a direct project expense and what is an administrative overhead?
The answer is project specific but generally speaking, your money is only used for direct costs immediately arising from the project that are not administrative in nature. In the above example, donation platform charges (£3) and yearly overhead costs (£7) are administrative so your funds would not cover them, hence we would need you to provide us with £130 to feed 100 people, and we would have to raise £10 ourselves to cover the remaining administrative costs.
Now, who covers the £10 of administrative costs? Some may argue that it is acceptable to take administrative costs out of your funds, we don't essentially disagree with this, but we have 2 reasons why we do not do this. The first is that with much larger projects, certain distant and indirect costs (such as flights) can dilute how much of your funds directly help the needy, and secondly, we are fortunate to have sponsors that directly fund our running costs. .
For more information on our policies, read our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.
Help us out.
Contribute towards our running costs. These run into several hundred pounds per year, for a small charitable organisation, that is a lot!