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News & reports

What we have done, and what it cost.

Every delivery ends with a record: what was bought, where it went, what it cost, and who received it. Mission reports are published here, alongside governance news and the independent checks that let a stranger decide whether to trust us.

Mission updates

We write when we come back from a school. What we carried in, what it cost, what changed. A few times a year, not more.

Morocco · Twiza programme

Returning to the High Atlas Mountains

We are preparing our return to Morocco's High Atlas Mountains, to valleys first reached after the Al Haouz earthquake of September 2023.

The need has not moved on with the news cycle. As of September 2025, some 220 schools across Al Haouz, Azilal and Chichaoua were still not functioning. Reconstruction money rebuilds walls and roofs; it rarely refills the classroom. Children sit in repaired shells without desks, books, computers or power — which is the specific gap School Aid exists to close.

Twiza is the Amazigh word for neighbours carrying one load between them. It is what the villages do for each other, and it is the only sensible description of how this work gets done.

Three Morocco missions have already been reported in full: March–April 2024, the journey that started School Aid; 4–19 November 2024; and 9–25 January 2025. Our August 2026 Philippines follow-up is also published. A report on the next Morocco mission will follow the same pattern.

Support the Twiza programme About the programme

· Recognition

Google for Nonprofits approves School Aid

Administrator access approved: Workspace, the YouTube Nonprofit Program, Earth and Maps, and eligibility to apply for the Google Ad Grant. A finding about legal form and public benefit — not an endorsement, and we will not describe it as one.

Read the full story →

30 July 2026 · Recognition

OpenAI approves nonprofit pricing

On 30 July 2026 OpenAI confirmed School Aid MTÜ for its nonprofit discount, following charity verification carried out by Percent, now trading as Goodstack.

Who they are. OpenAI is the research company behind ChatGPT. Its nonprofit programme discounts those tools for verified charities rather than donating them outright — a smaller gesture than a grant, and an honest one.

Why it matters. School Aid has four people and a dog. There is no communications department, no grants officer, no translator, no analyst. Work that a larger charity would hand to a department has to be done by the same four people who also load the vans. Tools that compress that work are not a luxury here; they are the difference between running two country programmes and running none.

29 July 2026 · Recognition

Canva approves School Aid for its nonprofit programme

Canva confirmed School Aid MTÜ for Canva for Nonprofits on 29 July 2026.

Who they are. Canva is the Australian design platform used by hundreds of millions of people every month. Its nonprofit programme gives verified charities the full professional toolset at no cost.

Why it matters — and this one is less obvious than it looks. Small charities are quietly penalised for looking small. A donor deciding between two organisations they have never heard of will, consciously or not, read a clumsy leaflet as a sign of a clumsy operation. That instinct is unfair but it is real, and it costs good organisations money every day.

Design is also operational. A safeguarding poster on a classroom wall, an equipment label a storekeeper can read at a glance, a receipt a donor can actually understand — these are field tools, not decoration.

29 July 2026 · Recognition

monday.com admits School Aid to its Nonprofit Program

Approved 29 July 2026. monday.com states that it reviews every nonprofit application against its eligibility requirements in partnership with Goodstack.

Who they are. monday.com is a work-management platform used by well over 200,000 organisations to plan and track work across teams.

Why it matters. Our four people sit in four different places, across several time zones, and our work happens in Morocco and the Philippines. A mission has perhaps two hundred moving parts — quotations, customs paperwork, freight bookings, school lists, safeguarding checks, receipts — and any one of them, dropped, can leave a container sitting in a port at our expense.

Coordination failures do not look dramatic. They look like a delivery arriving after term has started. Getting this right is not administration for its own sake; it is the difference between equipment reaching a classroom in September or in January.

27 July 2026 · Recognition

Anthropic approves School Aid for Claude for Nonprofits

Submitted 27 July 2026 and approved 5 August 2026, following verification by Goodstack.

Who they are. Anthropic is the AI safety company behind Claude. Its nonprofit programme makes those tools available to verified charities on discounted terms.

Why it matters, stated plainly. A great deal of this charity's written work — funding applications, board papers, compliance filings, translations, this website — is produced by four volunteers who also have other lives. Nothing here replaces the judgement of the people who sign it, and every factual claim on this site is checked against a primary source before it is published. But the drafting, the checking and the sheer administrative weight of running a registered nonprofit across two continents are lighter than they would otherwise be.

We would rather say that openly than let anyone assume a four-person charity produces this volume of documentation by magic.

27 July 2026 · Verification

Goodstack verifies School Aid MTÜ

On 27 July 2026 Goodstack confirmed our account as verified.

Who they are. Goodstack — legally We Are Percent Limited, of Bell Yard, London, and known as Percent until its 2024 rebrand — is the independent validator that large companies use to check whether an organisation claiming to be a charity actually is one. It verifies organisations across more than 240 countries and territories, and its clients include LinkedIn, Atlassian, HSBC, Airbnb, Canva and Zoom. Last year it processed donations to close to a million organisations.

What a validator does, and what it does not do. Goodstack answers one question: is this organisation genuinely a charity under the law of the country it is registered in? That is the door. It is not the room. Anthropic, monday.com and OpenAI each took Goodstack’s verification as a starting point and then applied their own eligibility criteria, their own questions and their own decision — as did Microsoft, Google, Canva and Adobe on their own terms. Being verified once does not get you approved anywhere; it only means you are allowed to ask.

That distinction matters, because it is the difference between one achievement and nine. Each organisation on this page reached its own conclusion about School Aid MTÜ, separately, against its own standard.

That is worth more to a cautious donor than any statement we could write about ourselves.

20 July 2026 · Governance

Three appointments strengthen the team

School Aid approved three appointments by minuted resolution on 20 July 2026. The Estonian Business Register amendment is not yet complete; until it is, the register shows one management board member and the three act as members of the association.

Maribeth Buo de Montaigne joins as Co-Founder, New Country Development and Community Relations, bringing thirty years of government-relations and community-development work across Southeast Asia, China and Australia. She leads our entry into new countries.

Nichola Jane de Montaigne joins to lead Education, Learning Systems, Capacity Building and Safeguarding Guidance. A developmental psychologist and former Founding Head of a Norwegian international school primary division, with front-line social-work experience protecting vulnerable children.

Annabelle Buo Ramos-Hermoso joins as Education Quality Adviser. A Master Teacher with three decades in Philippine public education and a trainer for the Mathematics Teachers Association of the Philippines.

Related-party interests are disclosed openly, and those concerned recuse themselves where charitable and commercial interests could meet.

Meet the Board

13 July 2026 · Verification

TechSoup validates School Aid MTÜ

On 13 July 2026 TechSoup Estonia wrote: "Congratulations! Your organization, School Aid MTÜ, has been successfully validated." It was the first independent confirmation this charity ever received, and every approval that followed rests on ground it broke.

Who they are. TechSoup is a nonprofit in its own right — not a company selling a service, but a charity that exists to get technology into the hands of other charities. Through a network of 66 partner organisations it reaches over a million NGOs, validates charitable status in 236 countries and territories, and verifies around 150,000 nonprofits every year on behalf of the technology industry.

What validation actually involves. Not a form and a promise. TechSoup examines an organisation founding documents against the charity law of the country it is registered in — in our case Estonian law and our entry in the Business Register — and satisfies itself that the organisation is genuinely constituted for public benefit and not for private gain. Ours took a little under a week from the day the papers went in.

Why it matters. A charity registered nine months earlier, with no history and no reputation, has nothing to offer a stranger except its paperwork. Somebody has to be willing to read that paperwork first. TechSoup did, and said yes. Every organisation that followed still ran its own assessment — but the first yes is the hardest one to get.

Check us yourself

None of this needs to be taken on trust

School Aid MTÜ is registered in Estonia under code 80646408. The public Business Register shows our status, registered office, board, beneficial owner, tax position and filed annual accounts. It is free, it is public, and it takes about a minute.

We would rather you checked than took our word for it.

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