From our base in Perth, Western Australia, we currently run an online store where you can purchase images taken in countries around the world. We carefully track what revenue is made by each country, so we can then pass on a large part of the profits to our education partners in each country.

Who are your partners and how have you chosen them?

As we are still in our development stages, we are currently researching potential beneficiaries for each of the countries we have represented. The three main criteria we will be measuring the organisations against are:

1. They must run their organisation to the internationally accepted standard of having only 10% of their income contributing to the running of the organisation. This must be provable by a published and publicly available audit each year;
2. They must be directly involved in the country that the photos originated from; and
3. They must have a bias toward supporting education programs/assistance within the country, and demonstrate clearly how the funds are having an impact, though the use of case studies, testimonials, etc.

So how much money actually makes it to your education partners?

As we are only in our first year of operation, we are still fine tuning the numbers. However currently your purchases will be contributing an average of 50% of the sale price of any image back to our education partner that operates in that particular country. Our target by 2012 is to donate up to 90% as we grow and become more efficient in our processes.

Are you a registered charity?

No we are not. We are a philanthropic based company. Why? At our inception, this was the simplest model for us to begin with that would allow us to create an immediate impact in the countries we are working with, without the large amounts of red tape that is involved with setting up a charity. However as PWB develops, we will continue to review out structure and the viability of turning into a pure charity structure. If anyone has any experience in this field, we would certainly appreciate your input.

Do you have more questions that we haven't addressed? Please give us a shout!