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One question Dragon’s Den’s Deborah Meaden asked when she reviewed our business plan was: ‘What are you doing that’s different from any other organisation in Uganda?’ Well, the answer to her very valid questions is our Model of Social Care.
From the beginning, we have maintained that we are not building an orphanage. It might be a good way to get money, as the word itself is far more emotive than ‘short-term transitional home’ – but that is what we want to be. We will provide specialist care to safeguard the lives of infants whose might otherwise be at terrible risk.
Ultimately, our aim is for early rehabilitation, either back into the child’s natural family or to foster and adoptive families, rather than keeping children institutionalised until the age of 18.
And while too many babies are unarguably abandoned every week, it shouldn’t be assumed that the parents want to permanently give them up. Often, they do it to provide their baby with things they desperately need – such as life-saving drugs – or to get them out of harm’s way. As a parent, what choice would you make – keep your baby and risk their life because you can’t afford medication and care, or give your baby away where they will be looked after?
A grandmother wanted to keep her twin grandchildren but cannot afford to care for them
We are incredibly lucky to have Brian Waller, BSc, Dip Ed, MSW advising us on our Social Work model. Formerly a Social Services Director, Brian has run national and international children’s charities – plus, he has recent experience of working in Kenya, South Africa and Uganda.
Our model will constantly evolve as we have more conversations, establish strategic partnerships, and work with the Government of Uganda and the local community. One thing we’re determined to do is to involve the community from the outset. Our home will, in every way, feel “African” and not something transplanted from the outside.
Last night, Lucy and I were privileged and honoured to attend one of The Spectator Digital Dinners hosted by the editor Matthew d’Ancona (our Child’s i Foundation patron), held in their offices in Old Queen Street – right in the middle of Westminster. As well as some key members of The Spectator digital team, we shared a table with an interesting mix of some amazing political minds, media gurus, music movers’n'shakers and advertising industry impresarios.
Our patron Matthew d’Ancona previously gave a bit of background on why he holds these events:
Link to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8PYABLDViw
Last night’s focus was a discussion with Ian Leslie, author of To be President: Quest for the White House 2008 and influential blog Marbury.
Leslie gave us a summary of his understanding of Obama’s groundbreaking and hugely successful victory. A victory enabled by the technologies the web has given us to build a community, but driven by a deftly controlled team of passionate people who planned their campaign with meticulous exactitude. The whole campaign was also cleverly documented and visualised from day one and became a real life political entertainment show.
But the true brilliance of Obama’s campaign was that he enabled participation at a grassroots level. He (and his team of campaigners) asked people directly for help and made it clear to his community that this potentially astonishing victory was entirely in their hands.
Lucy and I kept winking and nodding at each other from opposite sides of the table with the general excitement of all of this. We believe our charity is a micro-version of Obama’s campaign – well you know, sort of!
Importantly, we know that we need every donation of time, love or money our community of supporters can give us. Our belief is that all of our supporters are stakeholders in our success and the combined force of our drive for this success will build a babies’ home in Uganda and will ensure our home has a sustainable future.
So after dinner, as is our way, we promptly got to work letting people know about our charity and that we needed their help. As has become a regular and heartwarming feature of our campaign and our astonishing story to date is that they all truly wanted to “give” in some way.
If you want to help our campaign, find out how you can give love and time by getting involved or how you can give money.
From the very start, our project has been about creating an active community of supporters – an online family who, together, can help us achieve our goal of building a babies’ home in Uganda.
We have encouraged you to contact us via our website, follow us on Twitter, join our Facebook group, ask us questions, help us with our to-do lists and come and meet us face-to-face in order to get to know us and our charity.
But now the time has finally come for us to ask you to “give us your money” – and we can no longer be shy about it. We have our gift aid code and our Justgiving account is set up, so we need to get raising funds.
We’ve got a massive task on our hands, as our home will not build itself on love alone (if it could be, we would have done it by now thanks to you), so if you can donate, please do: Click to Donate
FACT: If every one of our 1,300+ Facebook group members were to give £5 per month, we’d have £84k in a year– that’s more than a 10th of the way to our target.
BUT having done our Bob Geldof bit, we don’t want this to be just about you handing over your hard-earned cash. Instead, we’d love you to raise money by doing things you enjoy – or that you’ve always dreamed of doing – and using our charity as an excuse. So from sky diving to mountain trekking, or stand-up comedy to triathlons, if you want to do something sporty, musical, amusing, unusual or just generally magnificent to raise money, set up your Justgiving page here and get our community behind you.
And don’t forget to let us know about it – we want to help you as much as possible. Although we don’t have loads of glossy marketing material, we do have masses of volunteers who want to offer their time, including loads of TV people. See what you think of some of them here:
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3VXOlCB3hA
You never know, if you have a cracking idea, we might be able to get a camera crew involved or find you a venue. Just ask and we will see what we can do together.
To keep you up to date with what we’re currently up to, as well as our wonderful Undress For Uganda Campaign (watch the video if you haven’t seen it and email Hazel if you’d like to host one), we’re just about to have a meeting about organising a speed-dating night. Just think, what an opportunity – you could meet someone interesting AND help abandoned babies find a loving home. Watch this space…
The Golden Manor Medicine Show - ALL PROFITS GO TO CHILD'S I FOUNDATION.
Things are continuing to move at a great pace, and on Tuesday night our cause received a huge boost when a whopping 55 TV professionals came to our open evening. The aim was to tell them more about our charity and, of course, pick their brains for even more exciting, innovative ideas on how we can raise the money to build a home for abandoned babies in Uganda.
I felt quite daunted to begin with – we didn’t have a clue how many people would turn up, and I was so nervous at the thought of standing in front of my former peers and doing a presentation. But I needn’t have worried – Producer’s, AP’s, Editors, and Researchers from Big Brother, The Friday/Sunday Night Project, Richard & Judy, MTV, Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor turned up in force, giving us their time and their love.
It was the perfect opportunity to talk about the Child’s i Foundation, and work out how best we can utilise their invaluable skills of creating engaging content to help us build our worldwide community of supporters. We had amazing offers of not only coming out to Uganda to film video updates, but also to join our ever-growing team and help us with contacting celebrities, copy writing, PR and organising events, including a treasure hunt and even a speed-dating evening. We also drummed up volunteers for Aunty Pat’s knit-in, and a couple of brave souls will actually be running the 4800 miles from London to Kampala (it will take 10 months… we’ll keep you posted!)
All in all it was a hugely successful evening, and we can’t wait to get started on even more brilliant ideas.
Pictures of the evening were kindly taken by Colette (see them in the Flickr group) and a video filmed by Miranda and Ros will follow shortly…
What a day. Yesterday properly shifted into gear with Clay Shirky’s lunchtime talk at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts).
The talk was one of the ICA’s “Feedback” season events and as part of their investigation into the effects of networked and social media, they actively encourage the use of recording equipment during talks. So, rather than summarise Shirky’s talk we have uploaded two snippets recorded on the Flip (see our YouTube Channel).
We were dying to ask Shirky, in this changing world, how non-profits and charities could exploit the tools available to us. The microphone didn’t get to us but Lucy did catch up with him as he left the lecture theatre. He showed interest in our charity model and then mentioned his current writing about generosity within community. This will surely change third sector thinking or at least accelerate the change that has started to happen. We hold our breath in anticipation.
Clay Shirky talking at the ICA Feedback session in London
Our inaugural Child’s i Foundation meetup the Old Bank of England last night was testament to Shirky’s thinking that social tools – the internet, mobile phones, applications built on top of those “have provided an antidote to the hassle factor when you try to get a group of people to do something”. We used meetup.com to invite a group of “social innovators and supporters” to join us, to present our plans and ideas to them face-to-face and to ask for their feedback and involvement.
Link to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKXqB9pD-gQ
The evening was just so enjoyable. A group of 40 interesting and varied people offered us their time, helped us understand how to recruit and organise better, they committed to sporting and community fundraising events, offered us their expert technical expertise, architectural skills and marketing ideas. It didn’t even end at pub closing time. Several meetup community members have written to us today with ideas and incredible offers such as donating percentage profits from their new business to the charity and expert social work advice.
Talking, listening, collaborating, interacting at meetup
People travelled into London from other parts of the country for this event, people who didn’t previously know us personally but have connected with us online and understand our cause.
We are truly grateful to be able to collaborate and receive direct feedback from our community and look forward together to making this a really enjoyable venture to be part of.
The slideshow presentation from the evening is here on SlideShare.com
Our first ever meetup
One of our supporters Hannah Jones asked us the other day:
“What does the ‘i’ stand for in Child’s i Foundation?”
The ‘i’ stands for ‘interactive’. We want supporters to interact with the charity, talk to us, read our blog posts, watch the videos, join our networks etc.
But ‘i’ also stands for individual contribution. It is all about giving what you can.
So many of you have already given your time, love or money and we are so grateful. We would love you to show your friends and family that you have made a difference, that you have helped towards building a babies’ home in Uganda.
So, wear one of these super-cute little badges with pride.
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