The Aral Muna Scholarship Fund has been running out of a converted garage in Barangay San Isidro since 2021, and this is our fourth year asking for help to keep it going.

We cover the gap that free tuition does not: transport, meals, printing, uniforms, the exam fees that arrive three times a year and always at the worst moment. Forty-two students are enrolled with us this year, up from twenty-eight last year, and the waiting list has fifty-one names on it.

Here is what the arithmetic looks like. A student costs us about P1,234,567.00 over the six years we commit to them, spread across daily transport of around ninety pesos, a hot meal on school days, and the roughly P12,500.00 of fees and materials that land each year. Last year we spent P2,845,900.50 across the whole programme and every centavo of it is in the annual report, which we publish in January and hand out on paper to anyone who visits the garage.

What we are asking for this year is enough to take fifteen more students off that waiting list, and to finally replace the four laptops the students share, which are old enough that two of them cannot open the review materials the DepEd portal serves.

Every donation goes through this platform so that it is receipted and traceable, which matters to us because we are asking people in our own barangay for money and we have to be able to look at them afterwards. Our books are open. Come to the garage on a Saturday and we will show you.