Storming

Today we had a creative brainstorm to discuss the tagline and mission statement of the Child’s i Foundation. We were very lucky to have Adil Abrar (strategist) and David McCandless (writer) at the session, both are brilliant and have worked on campaigns for Amnesty.

Brainstorm

After half an hour spent explaining the project, Adil (quite rightly) pointed out that we have lots of USP’s but what we really needed to work out were our key messages – what were the reasons behind setting up the organisation. Why was I doing this project?

I immediately remembered Abraham, a baby who died of Meningitis aged just 4 months old.

Abraham

He had been abandoned in the taxi park when he was two months old and bought to an orphanage in Kampala. As I was stood burying Abraham under a mound of mud in an unmarked grave what really upset me was that, in Abraham’s short life, no one had ever cherished him. He was abandoned, he was an orphan and then he died. No one ever noticed his first smile or loved him like he was their own child, no one paid attention to his rash and more tragically, no one really truly missed him when he died.

Abraham's Funeral

These babies have no one to fight their corner. Abandoned in rubbish tips, toilets, taxi parks or by the roadside, they have no one and it is up to us to not only keep them alive but to give them a life. I don’t want children to grow up in orphanages, another statistic to add to the 2 million orphans in Uganda. I want them to be loved by their very own family.

Some really good ideas came out of the session – Adil suggested the project was like a co-operative and people could own a share in it similar to myfootballclub. I am really excited about the collaborative nature of this project because I really want people to feel like they are part of the project. If people give us their hard- earned money I want to be able to tell people exactly where their money is going – that’s why the Internet is the perfect tool to engage and inform our supporters.

One of the ideas for a tagline which came out of the session was ‘We make families, not orphans’. I am still not decided, so I’ll keep posting ideas up on the site until we come up with one we like.