Give and Tell Challenge
Like, I guess, everyone else, I now know more about ALS than I did before the Ice Bucket Challenge. The campaign has been hugely successful, has raised awareness and ten times more money than was raised last year to help combat the disease. Of course charity didn’t start and doesn’t end with the Ice Bucket Challenge and so my friend Paul Boag challenged me, Rachel Andrew and Carl Smith to:
The “Give and Tell Challenge.’ You donate to a cause, or causes, that have meaning to you and you say why. You then challenge 3 other people to do the same thing.
What we do as a company
We try to help charities in any way we can. We offer charities reduced rates and we also make twelve days a year available to work on projects pro-bono too. We use those days as needed, depending on the project and when they’re gone, they’re gone. We might not use them all on one project either. To be fair to more than one good cause, we might fund a ten day project to the tune of five days pro-bono with the good cause paying for the rest at our charity rate.
That’s exactly what we did for our work for the Rudi Martinus van Dijk Foundation. They’re a charitable foundation that supports young composers and conductors, who live in parts of the world where there’s political strife or economic deprivation. We spent ten days working with the foundation, designing their branding and a new website. The foundation paid for the first five days, then we completed the project pro-bono. We also donated a copy of Perch and paid for two Dalton Maag fonts too.
As well as the time we’ve donated to the foundation, in August this year, I was supposed to travel Sulaymaniyah, in North West Iraq to spend a week documenting one of the foundation’s workshop. Sadly, that workshop was cancelled when the security situation in the region became too dangerous to travel there.
Supporting WWF
I’m not sure whether you’ve heard, but I’m the country’s second biggest fan of The Planet Of The Apes. But my love of apes goes beyond the screen and I like to support ape conservation, in particular mountain gorillas, in any way that I can. Every year, for the last few years, instead of buying me gifts at Christmas, my family donate to WWF and adopt a mountain gorilla for me.
One day, I hope to travel to the area to see these gorillas for myself. There are only around 880 of these incredible creatures left in the world. So few that you could fit all the world’s population on two standard Virgin Pendolino trains (589 seats each.) A donation to WWF helps their work in Volcanoes National Park in the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda.
I’d love it if you’d make a donation to WWF too.
Nominating others
Paul asked me to nominate three others, to “either highlight a charity they give regularly to or give a one-off donation and tell us about the charity.”
My nominees are podcasters:
You have 24 hours to respond.