Fund-raising Retrospective

Yet more exciting news came through the post this week: my placement in Guyana has been confirmed! I now have lots more information about it, which will come up on this website shortly. However, before I start looking ahead to departure, and posting information about the project and Guyana, I thought it might be a good moment to cast a quick glance back over how the fund-raising’s gone.

I looked back through all the posts on this website recently, and it’s quite encouraging how many of the fund-raising ideas I’ve actually pulled off, along with a great deal of help from many people. A few of the highlights were:

• The night-before Valentine’s Day Ball, which I organised with Ross (who’s going to Chile with Project Trust); ironically, this didn’t successfully raise any money, barely covering the costs, but it was still a great night.


• Leicester Dress-in-Purple Day: a day held at my school where all 92 boys in my House (Leicester) at school were invited to dress in purple, and get their friends and families to sponsor them; this was the most successful single venture for my fund-raising, raising £718.65.


• The now-famous weekly muffin sales, which earned me the title of ‘The Muffin Man’ among most of the lower years at my school.

So, of all the plans that I mentioned on the website, here are those that I pulled off:

• Produce an information leaflet to give to all potential donors;


• Sell home-made muffins at school with Ross;


• Run a raffle at the school Christmas fair (although admittedly this was only for one Magnum of Champagne, and I split the proceeds with Ross);


• Lay on a black-tie ball (albeit without the expected financial success);


• Hold a sponsored Dress-in-Purple Day at school;


• Get half the school Christmas Carol Service collection to be donated to Project Trust (on my behalf);


• Hand out Smarties tubes to all my colleagues at work, and ask for them to be returned in a couple of months filled with 20p coins;


• Send out Christmas cards to all my family, including the leaflet with them.

And these are the ones I failed to get around to:

• Send out letters & leaflets to over 100 charities/companies.

Given a natural tendency to apathy – especially when the deadline seemed so far away – I don’t think that’s bad going, and it certainly was enough: I’ve now gone beyond my target of £3,950. Hopefully any future Project Trust volunteers looking for some fund-raising ideas will find something useful here.

As far as writing to charities is concerned, I think I found a happy medium. Project Trust suggested the most successful way to raise money in this fashion would be to write to at least 100, ‘blindly’: that is, look up at least 100 charities in The Directory of Grant-Making Trusts that your project might seem more-or-less relevant to, and send off a letter and your leaflet to them. Project Trust suggested over 100, because the success rate is not very high, and even lower writing to companies. I wrote off to around 30 companies ‘blindly’, and received one donation, so this was presumably about the average return rate (3.33% to 3s.f.).

Instead, however, I did write to two ‘targeted’ charities: that is, charities which are very closely linked either to me or what I intend to do in Guyana, and therefore from which I would have a much higher chance of receiving some donation. Both of these were successful: the St Michael’s at the Northgate Church’s Education Trust is based at my local church which my family have been regular members at (and where I sang in the choir until I was 13), and have promised a donation of £250 (still pending), and the Bulkeley-Evans Scholarship Fund provides scholarships to pupils from HMC schools (which my school happens to be) going to Commonwealth countries in their gap years, and has supported Project Trust volunteers frequently in the past, and donated a very generous £500.

Not only did writing to these two charities prove very beneficial, it was also far more effective than writing to anything less than 100 charities blindly, and so is definitely an avenue I would recommend to future fund-raisers (of course, finding such charities may be impossible or require far more research than just sitting in the library with the Directory for two days, so it depends; I was lucky).

And, of course, a large part of these funds came from the vast well of generosity that is my family (the sprawling Warner tribe), and I owe a great deal of thanks to all of them, as well as my House-tutor Mrs Lydford, who suggested most of the ideas for fund-raising at school.

So, at last: the end of the fund-raising posts. No doubt I gained some valuable experience in the process of raising £3,950, but I’m not sad to have completed it, and if even I can manage to do it two months before the deadline, I hope anyone reading this who might consider a gap year – and is put off by the cost – might stop to reconsider.

Closing up, cashing up, and looking forward

Having plateaued at around £3,200 for a while, my fund-raising received a very welcome – and unexpectedly large – kick-start again today: the post arrived with a letter from the Bulkeley-Evans Scholarship Fund, whom I wrote to in February, together with a cheque for £500 – the single biggest donation I’ve received to date. This exceptional generosity is the result of a prestigious fund providing scholarships to pupils from HMC (Headmasters’ Conference) schools going to Commonwealth countries on their gap year, for which Project Trust astutely gave me the details. I have been very fortunate in being the recipient of one of the largest sums they donate – other than two even larger scholarships for candidates in particular financial need – so I am very grateful. (If you are thinking of doing a gap year, then I very much recommend looking at their website, as they have proved very welcoming and helpful, and, of course, generous).

Secondly, I’ve restarted the weekly muffin sales at school (sporadically supported by Ross with his brownies), and so the sum of this for the last two weeks, plus the scholarship from the Bulkeley-Evans Fund, brings me up to a grand total of £3860.51 – within £100 of my target! Given that I’ve been promised a cheque from another education charitable fund for £250 – which has yet to arrive – this effectively means my fund-raising is complete. The excess money from any donations, such as the pending one for £250, plus the muffin sales (which I can hardly stop now as it seems half the school’s population has become dependent on them), will continue to go towards Project Trust, but will be used to help other volunteers who may not have had such luck reaching their target – something which I am very happy to contribute towards, since the seemingly insurmountable terror of fund-raising still lurks in the back of my brain.

As school is drawing to a close and my departure date draws nearer, I’ve been able to focus more on what next year will bring, and I have become increasingly aware – and appreciative of – the true value of donations such as the one mentioned above – and the countless smaller ones throughout the past months – and the generosity of those who share my hopes. It is very difficult, in Oxford, to imagine what it will be like, living day in and day out for 12 months in Guyana, and to imagine all the challenges with which I will be faced: however, while this does serve to increase both my excitement and – to a certain extent – trepidation, I sincerely hope, alongside learning from and helping those with whom I will be sharing a community, to convey an appreciation of the community in which I will be living back to others in the UK, and I believe that keeping in touch with those that are helping me achieve this is an important part in fulfilling these aims.

To this end, this site will now begin to shift its focus from fund-raising, to my immediate preparations for departure, and, thereafter, to life in Guyana and my Project there.

So, what next? The major task, prior to departure, seems to have been accomplished. In the next couple of weeks I should receive confirmation of my project in Guyana. I’ve also (at last!) got offers from universities (conditionals of AAA from Dundee (my first choice) and AAB from Sheffield (my insurance choice)), so the impending grinder of exams – about a month away, now – should be the next thing to set my sights on, but, as always, it will probably take until at least three days before the exams for the pressure really to get going (and as of January I now have an A in biology and an A in maths, so it’s only chemistry that needs hammering away at).

I’ve also been clocking up the jabs – the BCG (for TB), a Hep A jab, a Typhoid jab, and double-checking that I’ve got Polio, Diphtheria/Tetanus, and MMR jabs – so that I’m probably more full of disease than if I actually had any one of them. However, it’s all good; the only two left are probably Yellow Fever, and Hep B – the latter perhaps not essential for Guyana, but it is essential for medical school, and it’s proving a right pain, since it’s a long course and I’ll have to fit it around my gap year.

With regards to this site, I will finally compose some posts on Guyana, my project there, and myself, so that there will be some kind of reference to which all the fund-raising posts below may relate. I’ve been gathering together books to read in preparation, so with the help of Lonely Planet’s South America On A Shoestring, The Gap Year Book, Travel Photography, Travel Writing, and The Rough Guide To South America, as well as information from Project Trust and any relevant websites, I should have enough content to fill a few posts before actually leaving.

Of course, as mentioned above, I have yet to receive Project Trust’s confirmation letter, and this will be the crucial last step, so some of those posts may wait until then; but rest assured, this site will slowly and eventually transform into what its true purpose is: a blog describing my experiences living, teaching, and travelling in Guyana, rather than a dull accounting book.