In May 2006, a mud eruption befell the area of Sidoarjo where thousands of families lost their houses, jobs and hopes.

Eight years have passed since this happened and the mud now covers an area of almost 10 million square meters; equivalent to 1,400 football fields, and to this date has not shown any signs of stopping.

We introduced the idea to transform the mud of Sidoarjo into bricks to a local NGO, whose job is to ensure the welfare of the victims. Together, we appointed architectural material experts and after three years of intense research, the required formula was discovered.

The brick has been scientifically proven to be safe for housing constructions and is environmental friendly, as it only requires a mixture of mud, cement and calcium hydroxide without undergoing the combustion process.

Along with numerous volunteers, the 'House of Mud' team organized a workshop for the victims and so in the future they can produce their own bricks.

Through www.houseofmud.info people can donate a brick. Each brick is named after the donor and given a unique number to reassure the donors that their donation has been used correctly.

The collected bricks were used to build houses for the victims while creating job opportunities and new economical prospects for the community.

The campaign has got the nation talking and has generated over US$1,000,000 worth of media exposure.

A few weeks after the campaign was launched, a house was built, jobs were created and the people of Sidoarjo regained the most important thing in their lives; hope.

We introduced the idea to transform the mud of Sidoarjo into bricks to a local NGO, whose mission is to see to the welfare of the victims. Together, we appointed architectural material experts and after three years of intense research, the required formula was discovered.

The bricks, which have been scientifically proven to be safe for housing constructions, happen to be environmentally friendly, as it only requires a mixture of mud, cement and Calcium Hydroxide without undergoing the combustion process.

Along with numerous volunteers, the House of Mud team organized a workshop for the victims, which in the future, enables them to produce their own bricks.

From October to November 2013, we received US$1,045,949.16 worth of free media exposures including 41.85 minutes of television airtime, 14 columns of print articles and 99 web articles.

We spent US$ 50,355.00 in PR fees and US$79,080.00 in production costs, which rounded up our total cost to US$129,705.00.

Given the provided figures, we summed up our return on investment to be 7158%.

Since the project launched in 2013, we managed to collect US$104,000 in donations, which we converted into 130,000 bricks and those bricks were used to build 65 homes for the Sidoarjo victims.