Muffin mania

Today, after a sustained propaganda campaign (plastering the school in posters, and repeated daily notices at registration) Ross and I tried out our pilot run of muffin- and brownie-selling, and discovered that the kids at our school really are being deprived of good food… or just never can get enough. We sold out all 96 muffins and 60 brownies (Monday night was a looong night of baking) in 20 minutes, making, between the two of us, £80.03 (some people gave donations along with buying the food – CHEERS!). Not bad going, eh?

Looks like we’ve struck gold. It’s half term next week, but we’ve decided definitely to make this a regular event in the second half of term and beyond. Now it’s more a question of our production ability – it did take a whole evening out yesterday to make them all, and I don’t know if I can afford to take two evenings off a week for baking, so we’ll probably just sell them once a week – keep the masses ravening for more. But, success, anyway. Our first real bit of fund-raising – excitement!

Other avenues of fund-raising also seem to be continually popping up – the more people hear about what we’re doing, the more people seem to come up with ideas to help. It’s actually quite surprising, if not a little overwhelming, but very welcome! So far my House Tutor has suggested getting my whole house at school to get involved in some sponsored event and then donate the money they raise through sponsorship to Project Trust; something like getting all the 92 lads of Leicester (my house) to dress predominantly in purple (my house’s colour… yes, and at an all-boys school… unfortunate) for a day, which could probably be quite popular just for amusement value. Also, I’ve talked with the Rev. and another teacher in charge of the Christmas charity collection, and they suggested half of it could (possibly… still have to properly sort that out) go towards Project Trust, and similarly a home-clothes day could be arranged sometime, probably next term.

And that’s all on top of the ball and raffle, which we still have to get around to arranging. But things are taking off, at last. We might just make it to the £930 deadline of December 1st, hopefully – still pretty daunting, especially when others from my selection course have already raised over a grand. Hare and tortoise, hare and tortoise… Yep.

Finally, while I have produced my leaflet and had it double-checked by Project Trust, I do still need to complete a list of charities I’m going to send it off to, in the hope that some might support me. I aim to write off to at least 100 charities and trusts, so that’s a fair bit of time needed in the library poring over the ‘Directory of Grant-Making Trusts’. Until then, I will put up the posts on this website that I had said I would earlier (one about who I am, one about Project Trust, one about Guyana and what I’ll be doing there, and one about how the money from all this fund-raising is spent, or possibly all four in one), but I’ll try not to lift it too much straight out of the leaflet, as, if you’ve found this website, you’ll probably have seen the leaflet already.

More to come, probably more frequently. Lots also happening at the moment unrelated to PT (such as UCAS getting my application wrong… and then wrong again), but things seem to be falling together alright, and I’m off to Scotland again this Sunday, so the world is clearly spinning in the right direction once more!

Back in action

Having let it languish for the past month, I am finally getting my fund-raising act in gear again (that’s not to say that I’ve just been lazy this past month – the lovely Louise came down to visit for a week from Glasgow, and I – finally – bought a motorbike, my last great expenditure before saving all the coppers for Guyana).

I found out a while ago – much to my surprise – that I was not, in fact, the only person from my year at school to be taking a gap year through Project Trust: my friend Ross will be going to Chile to teach English, at the same time as I go to Guyana. Since he is equally as far behind on the fund-raising front, we’ve banded together in mutual motivation, and it’s already paying off: I’ve at last produced my (full-colour, double-sided) leaflet, and we have begun to put into action some plans we’ve discussed for fund-raising events. These are at varying degrees of readiness, but so far they are:

• Selling home-made muffins and brownies at school, for 50p each. We made snazzy posters to put up around the school, and in the next few days are going to approach the local Sainsbury’s to see if they might donate some baked goods – it’s worth a try.


• Running a raffle at the school Christmas fair; I think that a first prize of a Magnum bottle of champagne would be attractive enough to make plenty of people enter, and cover the cost, and we’ll try approaching the local Odd Bins or Bottoms Up to see if they’ll donate it or any wine.


• Laying on a black-tie ball (~£15 a ticket) for our friends and their friends and their friends’ friends etc. at the very start of the Christmas holidays. A friend of ours recently returned from her gap year, and she did the same to great success, and has very kindly offered to give us advice on that front. We’ve decided on the venue, and since, helpfully, we know the owners of it personally, we might try approaching them to see if we could save some money on that front. Similarly, since I work in an ice cream café which often provides ice cream for the college balls around Oxford, I’ll try asking them if they’ll donate some ice cream for it.

More fun to come as things progress, but once this all gets started, hopefully there won’t be many more lethargic months like this last one.