Good day Merry March’lings!
Behold the 3rd month of the year – I hope you’re settling into a wonderful 2024 and you’ve taken time in the past weeks to go outside and smell a daffodil or two? Coming up is your fortnightly dose of social tips, tricks, treats and topics, all for a better world. In today’s special edition, like those daring daffodils, I’m sharing a selection of ideas for social initiatives that I’ve had, but which have naughtily hidden themselves away, scrawled in various notebooks. Today, I’m giving them a Spring airing! Please enjoy and get in touch if you fancy discussing any of them further.
1. Grand Designs: Improving Refugee Home Office Accommodation – imagine your 60-minute episode of Grand Designs, but a collaborative, real-life and uplifting monthly volunteer effort to turn some of the Home Office’s quite-frankly-depressing houses for asylum seekers into beautiful places that boost wellbeing. Imagine chapters set up in different cities… Imagine engaging with Men’s Sheds and other voluntary groups with relevant skills… Imagine the ‘before and after’ media content and the potential to generate donations or in-kind gifts of appliances and paint… Think depth of impact for a few individuals, rather than breadth of impact…
2. Great British Ambassadors: Slow travel mapping Britain’s refugee solidarity movement – Think a year-long journey through the 4 nations visiting every town, village and city that has a solidarity movement stepping in to create community and foster inclusion. Think travelling by bus, slowly, producing a country-wide map of the people, places and projects helping people who are refugees to rebuild new lives. Think podcasts, photo journalism, and an interactive mapping of efforts that this country’s incredible solidarity efforts.
3. Playing with Gift Aid: Climate Aid – When I last checked, about 3% of charitable money went on addressing climate change. Yet with climate change posing an existential-level threat, how about incentivising donations and raising a new fund for a community-driven Great Green Transition? Here’s how: in 2023, Gift Aid (tax relief in the UK on donations) raised £1.6 billion. Let’s petition the government to add 3% on top of the current 25% (or reduce Gift Aid to 20% and reallocate that 5%), immediately raising an additional £19 million each year that could fund climate justice projects.
4. The Shit Foundation Awards: Holding funders accountable to those they fund – Introducing the #ShitFoundationAwards. Think a quick, anonymous survey sent out yearly to funders and to organisations that receive funding (a bit like Fashion Revolution‘s Fashion Transparency Index). Funders share their processes that put grantees first; and grantees share their real-life experience, their gripes and grievances. We create an annual report and a public ‘loser board’ of the foundations that treat their grantees the worst: from overcomplicated reporting to restrictive grants and poor policies. Want to join me at the Loser’s office to award the wooden spoon?
5. Introducing FlixFund: Micro-donations for independent cinema – I don’t know about you, but I do often stream stuff illegally online. I don’t feel great about it, but my sympathy for the mega-conglomerate production houses of America only extends so far. Independent cinema, on the other hand – yes please! So what’s FlixFund? A simple Chrome extension you install and connect with a debit card. Whenever you’re streaming online, you automatically make a micro-donation of 20p to offset your naughty behaviour and bad conscience! Think of it like Robin Hood (stealing from the rich/Hollywood, giving to the poor/independent). Envelope please: let’s say 20 million installations x 20 micro-donations/year @ 20p = now let’s go grant out that £80 million to independent film-makers!
📣 Opportunities and Offers
👨💻 Join Aspen UK’s Rising Leaders Fellowship – a London-based group of change-makers
♻️ Sign up to The Big Plastic Count – join me in taking part next week
📚 Apply for Changemakers for Education – if you’re based in Asia, I cannot recommend this enough!
That’s it for this fortnight! As ever, please let me know your thoughts and feedback – and send anything you’d like me to include in upcoming editions this way.
