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This is such an inspiring letter from one of our supporters, we thought it was worth publishing:
Only asking for a fiver
Hey Lucy
I raised Child’s a healthy little sum of £100. Quite amazed actually as I had planned on doing this race for some time now with A. and she was raising money for guide dogs. She kept on going on about her sponsorship and I was all like, I can’t ask people for money so soon after running last years marathon. But then I thought about your charity and realised that I worked with a whole bunch of new people who I didn’t know back then and could happily ask for cash from.Like you, I hate asking for money so I decided to send a blanket email to them all really emphasising the fiver aspect. I told them strictly that they weren’t to sponsor me any more but that I wouldn’t accept anyone telling me they couldn’t afford it, after all it was only a fiver. And what do you know the plan actually came off. The pressure of only being asked to donate a fiver really worked and 16 people from one production coughed up and there’s still 1 person to go!
So really chuffed that I made the effort.
Kevin’s fundraising page on Justgiving: “Only asking for a fiver”
Set up your own Justgiving Fundraising page (it is basically an online sponsorship form and it only takes 5 minutes to set up).
Set up your own fundraising page
Nipple tassles, a drag queen, a Frank Sinatra impersonator and 40 hot singletons in one room drinking 2 for 1 cocktails – it wasn’t your run of the mill Monday night. Not for me anyway, but maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong in life.
Welcome to our inaugural Romance and Dirty Glamour speed dating evening which raised a whopping £800 for our charity.
Looking for love and raising money for charity
It was Child’s i Foundation supporter Kirsty Mitchell’s brainchild. She had a couple of weeks to kill before ascending Everest and came up with the tantalising combination of fundraising and finding Mr Right.
We didn’t want to make it just your average speed dating night, so enter Ruth Newman, Director of Channel 4’s Faking It Burlesque special. She was in charge of the evening’s entertainment. Frank Sinatra got us in the mood with Moon River and Faking It burlesque star Scarlet Fever treated us to synchronised nipple tassle action, topped off by Chrys Columbine giving us a ivory-tinkling performance and a cheeky striptease.
Faking It's Scarlet Fever
TV producers, bankers, lawyers, IT professionals, journos, they all came looking for love. Chat-up tactics were varied and occasionally maverick. One chancer declared his love to every girl in the room, another asked for a private burlesque dance. Cheeky. There were a couple of snogs at the end of the night and much love in the air.
We can honestly say that every person who turned up were genuinely lovely people who were a real laugh to hang out with. Only time will tell if one of our matches is a success story – we’d better be invited to the wedding.
For more photos take a look at our Flickr group
A long list of thank you’s for making the evening a success:
The organisers of the evening: Kirsty Mitchell, Rhiain Jenkins, Ruth Newman and Kate Ashton
Sarah Clark for filming the evenings shenanigans
Karla Gowlett for taking amazing pictures of the evening www.karlagowlett.co.uk
Laurence Merrett @ The Peacock Club for providing the spectacular venue for free www.the-peacock-bar.co.uk
Our fabulous compare for the evening Lady Jane AKA Jonathon Richardson
Faking It’s very own Scarlett Fever www.scarletfeverburlesque.co.uk
Our very own raunchy vixen Chrys Columbine http://www.myspace.com/chryscolumbine
The wonderful Frank Sinatra AKA Michael Campari http://michaelcampari.com/
Matthew here – with an update on what we got up to last night in sunny SW12.
Julia Bellis, who is programme managing the project brought together the motley crue of Rory MacDonald, Ghazwan Hamdan, Patrick Sinclair and little me to review progress of the Buy a Brick campaign which will be launching later this year. We’re building an interactive virtual wall, which will allow you to purchase your very own ‘brick’ by making a donation to the charity. With every brick, you’ll be able to write a little message of good wishes, or even a dedication – and then see everyone else’s donation by browsing around. We like to think it is a visual representation of what our charity is all about, by working together in small steps to build a much bigger end result.
Ghazwan has done some amazing designs for the virtual wall itself, Rory will be building the wall in Flash so it animates and interacts beautifully and Patrick has already done a large amount of work on pulling together all the code in the background which will allow you to buy the brick and add it to the wall.
It has been a truly collaborative project, and quite a learning curve for some of us – I’ve set up plenty of e-commerce solutions in the past, but when you’re working as a charity, different rules and legislation apply, so we’ve been held up by some things, but the energy hasn’t been dampened despite the red tape, and we’re on track for a launch in the early Summer (and by the looks of the weather here today, that’s just around the corner!)
You can see more pictures at the flickr group.
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.
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
As ever it has been go-go-go at Child’s i Foundation HQ but whilst we cogitate and procrastinate over the nitty gritty of virtal bricks and mortar, Twitter anxiety and merchant trading accounts, our supporters are out there raising the money to make the real stuff happen.
It was tough but last night we had to dance the night away at Ginglik in Shepherds Bush, London, courtesy of The Golden Manor Medicine Show (Adam Adler, Jules Fuller, Ali Hawkins, Neil Webster and special guests) to magnificent covers of The Felice Brothers, Langhorne Slim, Dylan, The Band, Johnny Cash, Josh Ritter, The Stones, Muddy Waters and a couple of their own.
Approx £400 was raised thanks to the band and a few collection buckets. We highly recommend you follow the band on Facebook and watch out for their next gig.
The Golden Manor Medicine Show at Ginglik
Meanwhile across the waters in Japan Child’s i Foundation supporter Brent Simmonds organised a charity golf day in Japan and raised £175.
Undress for Uganda continues its glorious reign with the latest event raising £408. Since UFU has already taken on a life of its own we thought it deserved its very own Facebook fan page. Please feel free to share your tips and ideas here to help others host a great party.
Julien Buckley has started to plan his epic cycle journey in July. The route is not yet certain but suffice to say it will be between 1,200 – 2,500 miles some where in Scandinavia. He is planning to tackle it alone but he would welcome offers of companionship from other (crazy?) cyclists – Watch his progress on his blog.
Never one to shy away from a challenge herself and unwilling to let our supporters take all the glory, Lucy Buck is leading by example and has committed to jumping out of a plane. Please sponsor the crazy lady on Justgiving.
And finally, if all you’re looking for is a night of romance and dirty glamour we can help you with that as well. Kirsty Mitchell is running Child’s i Foundation’s first speed-dating event burlesque style on 23rd March 2009. The tickets are like gold-dust so email Kirsty directly if you would like to join in the fun.
Keep those fundraising ideas coming …
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…
Last night, I stayed at my great Aunty Pat’s. She is 83 and likes making teddy bears, so I was suddenly struck by an idea – I’ve asked her to make 50 teddy bears, one for each of our babies.
Great Aunty Pat's teddy bear
She thinks it will take two years – I’m hoping it won’t take us quite as long to build the actual home…
Whilst we were discussing teddy bears, I ran a few initiatives of the charity by her.
As you may know, I come from the world of TV and we pride ourselves on the number of celebrities we can name drop in a single paragraph.
How can we use that to our advantage when it comes to fundraising?
Well, we are in the process of building a virtual wall at the moment so that our supporters can help build the actual home by purchasing bricks for themselves or their friends and family. Collette Callus, a friend, assistant producer and super-supporter of Child’s i Foundation has already suggested we pool all of our celeb contacts and ask them to purchase exclusive “golden bricks”. We think this a grand idea.
How many celebrities do you know, or know of, who might be happy to support us by donating a small portion of their great riches?
Aunty Pat gave us her short list: George Clooney (“he’s quite attractive”), Noel Edmonds (“he makes wishes come true”), and her all-time favourite celebrity, Lulu (“what a voice!”) So there you go, Aunty Pat has suggested the first three celebrities. We will do our best to get them involved.
Back to our main aim though – it’s not all celebrities and teddy bears. We are establishing a worldwide community of supporters to work together to build a home for abandoned babies in Uganda. We have been referring to this process and ourselves as “charity 2.0” as we are using internet-based tools to help achieve this.
But is all this techno-speak double-dutch to most people? To find out I am jumping straight in at the deep end – next Monday I’m going to give a talk about our charity to the Rotherfield St Martin’s senior citizen group. It will be an interesting exercise to see if they understand the concept – and how well I can explain it…
I popped up to the village hall to do some research and talk to a few of the local seniors and potential “silver surfers” . I was excited to discover that a few of them have decided to enrol in Internet lessons to find out what all the fuss is about.
I had a great response, especially from Marjorie and Doreen who were happy to tell me on Flip camera about their experience of the Internet.
Link: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=pcvgdbiZvyg
Next visit – we are going run a focus group with 16 – 18 year olds who all have squillions of Facebook friends to ask their opinion and get them on our team.
As an homage to Celebrity Big Brother (starting tomorrow) I thought we could all read the title of this first blog post of the New Year with a Marcus Bentley “Geordie” accent:
Day 1.
Right back to business … A new year, not a new start, but an official beginning. This project has been in the making for a long time now (read more about my inspiration) but over the past couple of months we have gained enough critical momentum to allow it to really kick it off. The key drivers:
- gaining charity status so quickly
- launching our first iteration of the website and social media profiles (twitter, facebook, delicious, youtube, flickr etc.)
- gathering a core team that give their time and love to the project
There have been some initial set backs, such as the delay in being able to set up any kind of online donation scheme (and we are still waiting for the relevant code from HMRC). But actually this has worked out in our favour; instead of watching the pennies roll in we have been been building our community, making connections, seeking advice and watching our supporters roll in.
Influential media types have written about us and we have been lucky enough to gain a wonderful patron in the form of Matthew d’Ancona, editor of The Spectator.
But we do need to start fundraising with force. We need those pennies, dollars and euros if we are to make our promise a reality.
In the next few weeks we are confident we will be able to deliver our much anticipated “buy a brick” campaign and will give our supporters the first chance to buy the first virtual bricks in the wall of our Home.
Sneak preview of wall prototype
My mum, very practically, is of course already making us money. Her community fundraising team have created fundraising brilliance with Undress for Uganda.
We really need Supporters across the globe to host an event, if the idea of a clothes swapping for our charity appeals to you please email my mum, Hazel Buck, for further details. It is after all a perfect time to trade in unwanted Christmas gifts or acquire a credit-crunching new wardrobe if you couldn’t face the Boxing Day sales.
There are loads of more fabulous fundraising ideas simmering away that we look forward to sharing with you in more detail over the coming months. But in the meantime, this is just a big thank you once again for your support so far.
Please continue to tell your friends, write about us, blog about us, or get involved. Everything up until now has been a rehearsal for the real show. Day 1 is today.
Child's i Foundation 
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