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.
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.
For the sake of complete transparency, even though this will be of very little interest to almost anyone reading this website, I’ve decided to explain a bit about the accounts from the Night-Before-Valentine’s Day Ball Ross and I organised as a fund-raising event in the February half-term. This will be very boring: I would not suggest reading it unless you are very interested in picking apart all the transactions my fund-raising money has been through. Rest assured it is all accounted for and now with Project Trust.
Costs of the Ball (money out): We decided to split the costs and the profits (or losses) 50-50. In the end, little extra things meant this wasn’t exactly the case. For most of these extras, I paid using my own money from my own current account. For the major costs, however, I used the money from my Project Trust savings account (which I set up when I started fund-raising) which had either been donated to me or fund-raised through other events (see the break-down of accounts on the right-hand side of this website). It is the money from my fund-raising account which is of primary concern here.
The cost of the venue was £1272.43; therefore, I paid £636.43 from my Project Trust account (Ross paying the other £636). Freud’s (the venue) also asked for a £450 deposit, which I paid all of using my Project Trust account; Freud’s kept £180 as ‘gratuities’ to the staff (this was in the contract), and £270 of this was returned to me.
Ignoring for now the fact that some of this deposit was later returned to me, money transferred out of my Project Trust account to pay for the ball therefore equalled:
£450 + £636.43 = £1086.43 (in fact I transferred £1087 for simplicity).
Money from the Ball (money in): After the ball, I received the £270 returned deposit, which I paid back into my Project Trust account. From ticket-sales to the ball we raised £1330 (since this is not a multiple of £15 – the price of the tickets – this is a little mysterious). From this, I took out £817, leaving £513.
This meant I had:
£270 + £817 = £1087
I was therefore even. The remaining £513 I gave to Ross. This meant that he was
£636 - £513 = £123 short
To even the losses, I wrote a cheque to Ross from my personal current account (i.e. not money fund-raised for Project Trust) for my half of the loss, which amounted to:
£123 / 2 = £61.50
Therefore, Ross and I both made a £61.50 loss. However, because I had paid this loss using my personal account, as far as my fund-raising was concerned, I had plugged this loss with my own money, and so no money fund-raised for Project Trust was lost.
As can be seen, the actual sale of the tickets proved to be… interesting. Our plan was to sell them through friends at various schools prior to the ball, and then sell any remaining ones on the door. As people came through the door, we either took their tickets or put to one side the tickets they bought on the door; this meant at the end of the night we had a fairly good estimation of how many people had come. While some of these got their tickets free (we allowed distributors to keep a free ticket for themselves if they sold 10), we counted 126 tickets taken in on the door. Our takings should have therefore equalled:
126 * £15 = £1890 Obviously, this is quite a bit more than was actually taken. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that it took some time for money to trickle back to us, after the ball, from distributors. Because some money was in the form of cheques, we didn’t want to leave it too long before cashing this money, so after a couple of weeks we did our accounts (as above) and called it a day with a loss of £61.50 each. Since then more money has trickled in, and I have been putting this in my personal current account until it totals more than £61.50, at which point we will have started making a profit, and I will put it into my Project Trust account. This has not yet happened, sadly, but we’re pretty close to it.
The second reason is because we suspect some distributors to have been less than honest with what happened to all the tickets they had in their possession. Unfortunately, our faith in the fundamental good nature of people was clearly a bit out of proportion with reality, and we suspect we were taken advantage of in this instance. Of course, since distributing was done in a fairly informal manner, it makes it quite difficult to over-come this, and so we have simply drawn a line under our accounts, which fortunately didn’t result in a very large loss.
So, while the ball was a great evening, as a commercial enterprise it wasn’t a huge success. However, we learnt some lessons from it, and hopefully any other Project Trust volunteers (or anyone else, for that matter) who might read this may benefit from it: keep a very close handle on all of the tickets, and don’t rely on people being generally honest (this is slightly unfair: many people were a great help, without us even asking them, and they deserve a lot of thanks; unfortunately, because of the few, it makes it difficult to rely on people’s good-nature when trying to make money).
Amazingly – considering the amount of money that seems to be flowing in and out of my two bank accounts (personal current account and Project Trust savings account) as I try to ride the wave of fund-raising without being sucked down into the depths – I have so far managed to keep track of every penny donated, and as of today have safely sent every one of them to Project Trust, and accounted for all of it down the right-hand side of this website. However, you may notice that the total on my Justgiving website is not the same (currently totalling £45.13 more). Where does this discrepancy come from?
The reason is that at the fund-raising information evening I attended earlier this month I discovered that Gift Aid given on any donations does not actually go towards my total, but goes to Project Trust as a whole. Of course, this by no means means you shouldn’t ‘Gift Aid’ any donations – Project Trust need the money to keep operating, as well as to go towards the £500 they raise for each volunteer on top of the volunteer’s fund-raising. However, it does mean I haven’t counted any Gift Aid in my total on this website, whereas the Justgiving website automatically includes the Gift Aid from any donations made through the website in the total.
And to add to the excitement, I went to a Project Trust fund-raising workshop this evening, and bought myself a nifty Project Trust Volunteer polo shirt. The actual evening itself wasn’t hugely informative, but it was good to touch base with Project Trust again. Perhaps a photo of the shirt (maybe even with me in it) will wing its way onto this site someday soon.
It’s been a while since the last post, at first because I was too busy to write one, and then because so much had happened that just composing the post became quite a daunting task. However, once again natural apathy was defeated, and the long-awaited round-up is here.
January kick started on a high with Hogmanay in Edinburgh with Louise, but an interview at Dundee University (who have still not got back to me…) and three A-level modules tried their best to stop the year becoming one long party. However, once they were over, the way was clear to finish preparations and start selling tickets for…
… the Night-Before-Valentine’s-Day Ball! Of course, first I got the flu quite badly a couple of weeks before, and then Ross caught it off me.
However, the preparations all came together. The venue was Freud’s on Walton Street, Herbie got the tickets printed for us at a discount, ice cream was provided at a 75% discount by George & Davis (my work), the live jazz band, composed of Heff (trumpet), Hal (guitar), Fraser (double-bass), Yogi (keyboard), and Cam (drums), were bloody amazing and it’s just lucky it was their first gig together so they didn’t think to charge us; DJ Switchdoctor (Eddie) and the Milky Bar K.I.DJ (Gilly) provided us with some great tracks that kept everyone on the dance-floor till the end, and my mum and dad did sterling work selling tickets on the door and scooping ice cream. And of course, the brave staff at Freud’s valiantly held the fort.
In other words, it was a damn good night. Unfortunately, Ross and I had been a bit slow getting around to selling tickets, and when we did, did not have quite as clear lines of communication with the distributors at other schools as we should have; in the end, we made a loss of £20 each. Of course, given that the total cost of the ball was around £1500, this wasn’t a bad effort, and it was a small enough loss to plug it with our own money, so that no money fund-raised for Project Trust was lost. However, given that we collected in tickets as people came through the door, and thus estimated there to be over 100 people there, at £15 a ticket this means there is quite a discrepancy, and the reasonably large profit which we should have made never reached us. A lesson to be learned, clearly.
Nonetheless, the impact on fund-raising was minimal (it would have been nice to bump it up a bit more with a tidy profit, but not essential given success on other fronts), and based on the comments people have said to me, the ball – as a ball, rather than a fund-raising vehicle – was a unanimous success.
Three days before the ball it was my 18th, and in preparation for Guyana I was given a digital camera. This was well timed, as it now means I have many photos of the ball, and they will be posted on here shortly. However, since then I have bought three books on digital photography, as I quickly realised that a nice camera and a quality party do not necessarily mean good photos, so they may need a bit of touching up on the computer before put up for public viewing.
On other fronts, the Smarties tubes I handed out at work have been trickling in over the past week, and the final total for them was £86.20! This was far more than I had expected (helped in large part by Phil & Andrea filling their tube with £1 coins – legends), and deserves yet another MASSIVE THANK YOU (there are a lot of those flying around now). G&Ds has been very supportive throughout my fund-raising so far, and has been a great place to work, with a great group of people, for the past two and a half year; so it’s a little sad now to be climbing down to one shift a week as I wind down towards retirement. A special thank you to Tom and Sally who have been there throughout (and for their Smarties tubes, too).
Other donations from individuals and charities are also continuing to come in, but in particular the school Christmas Carol Service collection was another big success, with half going towards my Project Trust fund-raising, and the other half going to another worthy charity. Thanks to the generosity of many parents (and the festive spirit) this raised over £900, of which £453.05 went to Project Trust on my behalf.
On top of all that, I had another interview, this time at Bristol University (again, for Medicine), last Monday. Still no word from any of the universities, but that means no rejections so far as well as no offers. It’s always fun to string out the stress.
However, while fund-raising is not yet complete, and while I have not yet heard from universities and have to wait until Thursday next week to get my marks for my January modules, the finishing line for these various projects is, hopefully, within sight. The grand total for all my fund-raising so far, therefore, is £3157.6, or 79.94% of my total, with another £250 promised by one charity. That’s not bad going, given the deadline is July.
That does mean that time is rapidly passing, and now that I have the dates for my training course (back on Coll), departure for Guyana seems to be getting a lot closer. I’ve been buying books about South America, travelling, travel photography, travel writing, and pretty much everything else, and planning kit-lists (fortunately most of which I already have). Next up is immunisation jabs, of which there will be many. It’s amazing, and I can’t wait to get away (especially after reading Max’s blog), but sometimes it does catch you, the thought of being away for 12 months – that’s a long time not to see anyone back home.
I have finally got around to gathering together all the various cheques and remaining coins that have trickled (and, occasionally, surged) in over the past couple of months, and done some adding up. The conclusion of which is that the grand total raised from the Leicester Dress-in-Purple day was far underestimated when first announced at school and in a thank-you letter to all the boys in Leicester, and is in fact a massive £718.65! A huge thank you to all of Leicester, and their very generous friends and family!
Secondly, the overall total so far has therefore been updated, and comes up to £2498.57, or 63.25% (4s.f.) of what I need to get to Guyana.
Again, more news planned shortly; next big piece of which will be the ball, which is rapidly coming together, and just requires tickets to be sold.
More news in a later post (there’s lots! – especially many thanks to the Warner clan for the many and generous donations!); however, just to highlight a happy surprise: while some people may spend hundreds and tweak their websites as much as they can to get a good position on Google when people search for them, my Just Giving website, without any intention on my part, comes up first when you search for “Benedict Warner” on Google! Now I just need to make my name world-famous.
According to Dr Mark Plotkin, the area of the Guianas takes its name from an English corruption of the Spanish spelling of a Surinamese Indian tribe. ‘Wayana’ is the correct name, but the Spanish wrote it as ‘Juayana’ or ‘Guayana’, and the English misread it as ‘Guyana’. The name does not mean ‘Land of Many Waters’, as is often alleged. Oops.
The December 1st deadline (for £930) has come and gone, and I managed to send off my first cheque to Project Trust, with the required amount, just in time! While that’s not entirely how I intend to continue (toeing deadlines), at least things have officially taken off now, and money will hopefully be coming in both more regularly and more frequently.
So, the news to date: the ball has been delayed, and delayed again: we’re now planning for holding it in the February half term, since the cost of any venue at a weekend is ridiculous, and it’s a bit late to hold in it the holidays. However, it does mean we can bill it as a Valentine’s ball (or the night-before Valentine’s, last-ditch attempt, ball), and, more importantly, there’s been success on other fronts.
A few weeks ago, I held a raffle at my school Christmas Fair, as a small side-stall. Since there’s a big raffle for the Parents Association that always happens at the Christmas Fair, I had to keep it quite small so that it didn’t compete, but while I only had one prize (a £40 Magnum of Champagne), I managed to sell 108 tickets at £1 each. Congratulations to Tony Morgan for winning!
Last Tuesday (December 6th), I held Leicester Dress-in-Purple day, as I had mentioned earlier. While not all of the 92 lads in my house actually came into school dressed in purple, there were some brave efforts, and some impressive sponsorship; the money is still coming in, but before the end of term I hope to announce a total raised from the event. It was definitely a success, so many thanks to all of Leicester for helping, and to Mrs Lydford for suggesting it.
The muffin sales have alas finished for this term, but they also provided a consistent success, with about £80 raised from the muffins each time, while Ross also was a run-away success with his brownies. We did six weekly sales in total, plus weekly standing orders from the Biology department, the Rev., and my house tutor Mrs Lydford. Many thanks to my mum, who went beyond the call of duty and helped bake vast quantities of muffins, espcially on the couple of Monday evenings where I wasn't free to bake - she's established herself once more as the muffin queen!
Last Monday was my work (George & Davis Ice Cream café, no less!)’s Christmas party, and we had a great night at Porters (a bar opposite our shop), including a game of cow tipping with an American football player dressed in one of our cow costumes. Being the shameless fund-raiser that I am, I took the opportunity to hand out Christmas presents to all my work-mates in the form of smarties tubes, which are for them to enjoy over Christmas, and then leave in a prominent place at home and fill with 20p coins each time they have some spare ones kicking around. I’ve asked for the tubes (hopefully full) back by February 1st, so fingers crossed for another success. GOOD LUCK to all the G&D’s lot, if I remembered to give any of them this website’s address.
And now I’m sending out the Christmas cards to all the family, and (finally!) finishing putting together a list of charities to write to, which I (really, really!) will do this week, before term ends.
Finally, on Thursday (8th December), it was the school's Christmas Carol Service, and Mr Bates very kindly arranged for half of the collection to be donated to Project Trust on my behalf. I have yet to find out the total amount raised from that, but early indications seemed to be very encouraging! (Of course, the carol service was then followed by the Prefect dinner, which was the real highlight of the evening).
And Christmas holidays (and Christmas itself, and New Year) all are drawing on at a frantic pace! I’m not sure I’ll get another chance to post on here before the New Year, (despite those promised posts about me, Project Trust, and Guyana still remaining in limbo), so until 2006, thank you everyone for your help, and merry Christmas and have a happy new year!
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!
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.
Last summer, from 8th to 12th August, 2005, I visited the Isle of Coll, off the west coast of Scotland, to attend a selection course for Project Trust. Having been selected, I now plan to spend my gap year (2006/2007) in Guyana, through this organisation, teaching science and maths to GCSE (Standard) level, for 12 months.Of course, that's all just under a year away, and by then I will need to have fully researched Guyana, and my particular project there, as well as fund-raised for the whole shebang. This will amount to just under £4000.
The purpose of this website is to act as a central information-source and as a journal, charting both the build-up to my gap year, and the year abroad itself. It will contain information about myself, Guyana and the projects there, and Project Trust, as well as regular updates on the progress of my fund-raising and up-coming fund-raising events. Once I reach Guyana, I will use it primarily as a link to my friends, family, and any donors around the world to share with them my progress and experiences.
Clearly, this is only the very beginning (and I’m already a bit behind). I’ll do a brief auto-biographical post soon, for those who know little or nothing about me, and a similar brief summary of Project Trust in a later post. After that, I’ll post news as and when it happens. For the time being, the best places to find more information are on the Project Trust website itself (http://www.projecttrust.org.uk/) and my Donations Page, where it is possible for you to donate directly to Project Trust.
In the next couple of days, I intend to send out letters and leaflets to a long list of charities I’ve drawn up, and any results from that I’ll post up here.
