Together we can make a difference

Comic Relief last night raised a record £57 million for good causes in Africa and Britain. This was an incredible £17 million more than their previous record. It just goes to show that even in a severe economic crisis people still want to give. Most importantly people want to get involved and show support by taking part in their own fundraising initiatives.

Collaboration and enjoyment are the driving forces behind the success of Comic Relief. Child’s i Foundation can only dream and aspire to such success and brand recognition, but our philosophy is similar – we believe in individual contribution (give what you can in measurements of time, money or love) and together, as a community, we will achieve our goals.

This belief system runs through everything we do: step forward the “Together to Uganda” Team:

I’m Katee Hui and I am the Programme Manger for the Together to Uganda team.

Together to Uganda Team

I have the privilege of working with a small, dedicated team of young people from Beacon Community College who have great ideas and a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. My team members are:

• Hannah Jones: Communications officer
• Matt Burton: Technology Strategist
• Sophie Phillips: Operations co-ordinator
• Tom Lawson: Marketing and advertising officer
• Alex Colville: Public outreach officer
• Chris Chater: Design officer
• Natalie Phillips (Deputy Programe Manager): Community and University Outreach

Our first campaign, Together to Uganda is all about mobilising people to collaborate and cumulatively travel the distance to Uganda through various means.

• The distance is 4012 miles or 6457km
• The idea is for various contributors to collaborate and cover this distance by a combination of different modes of transport.  From skiing to sailing, running to skipping, between groups of people

I will be co-ordinating the team and its activities.  My job is to help run the campaign, from the marketing and advertising side to the technological requirements and logistics. Currently, we’re working on the our strategy, target lists and timeline. Each team member has their own role too – to cover all of the bases so we can run a successful campaign.

Link to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnmD5vJjz9Q

We will be talking more about Together to Uganda – about our first event and how we plan to roll it out on a larger scale – at our next meetup on 8th April 2009 @ Savoy Tup, Strand, London. You can RSVP here.

Katee Hui is also Event Co-ordinator for Social Innovation Camp (this is where we met her and several other of our team members),  a London-based team who experiment in using social technology for social change: www.sicamp.org

p.s. Check out this T-shirt from Howies. We love it because it just about sums up our campaign. If you fancy having a go at designing something specifically for Together to Uganda along the same lines please get in touch.

Together to Uganda - Individual vs. Group effort

Digital dream team

The USP of the Child’s I Foundation is that we are harnessing the power of the internet to connect, engage and inform supporters.

As my web skills extend to being able to check the weather and being addicted to Facebook, I urgently needed to put together a team of experts to make this happen. Step forward Kirsty Stephenson, Matthew Knight and Nick Hall at Endemol Digital. They are now our digital team, who will be using open source tools, web 2.0, image hosting, video streaming, community tools, social networking, crowdsourcing and micropatronage. And no, I don’t know what they mean, either – except that, thanks to them, you’ll all soon be able to see exactly where your donations are going and how they are saving lives.

I have a lot to learn and incredibly relieved to have such an amazing team on board.