Charity

How We Can Best Support Children Living in Poverty

July 27, 2020 JayneLeave a comment

Children remain to be one of the most vulnerable members of society today. Every day, millions of children around the world experience abuse, poverty, hunger, and injustice. There are ways you can help these children even if you are far away from them. For those looking for different ways of supporting a child who is living in poverty, below are some organisations that accept support.

Singapore Children’s Society

Established in 1952, Singapore Children’s Society is an organization that is committed to protect and nurture all children, regardless of race and religion. It values commitment, compassion and caring, professionalism, openness to change, and integrity.

Its mission is to bring relief and happiness to children in need, and its vision is to be a leading-edge organisation in promoting the well-being of the child. The organization recognizes that the needs of children are evolving, and to meet those needs, charity institutions must evolve as well. Children’s Society offers four kinds of services, namely, Children and Youth Services, Vulnerable Children, Research Advocacy, and Family Services.

In 2019, the group was able to help more than 66,000 children and families in need. Children’s Society has a total of 12 centres in Singapore. To support the Singapore Children’s Society, you can apply as a volunteer or donate. To get in touch with the group, you may send an email at info@childrensociety.org.sg or call 6273 2010.

Children’s Wishing Well

Children’s Wishing Well is a non-profit and charity organisation founded in 2002. It offers a wide range of services for children and youth belonging to impoverished families in Singapore. The organization supports educational and daily living requirements of its beneficiaries and trains them so they will be able to support themselves in the future. It’s also the aspiration of the organisation that its beneficiaries will become productive members of society someday.

Children’s Wishing Well’s signature programme is a holistic enrichment initiative that provides weekly classes by professional tutors in music, sports, speech and drama, life skills, IT, and other subjects. It even organises field trips to expose children to different experiences outside of the four walls of a school. It also has a programme called Career GPS that lets young individuals go to companies to make them aware of available career options. The organisation also reaches out to companies to ask them if they can provide mentorship and work arrangements for the youths under its care. Monthly grocery shopping is also organised to ensure that the nutritional needs of the children and youth are being met. Facilities such as reading corners, computer workstations, and robotics stations are also present in Children Wishing Well’s centres for the free use of children and youths.

There are many ways you can support Children’s Wishing Well. You can sponsor a child, give gifts to children, donate to areas of need, and contribute to disaster relief efforts of the organisation. To help, you can either work as a volunteer or sponsor a child by providing specific items or giving a monetary donation. You can send them an email at info@wishingwell.org.sg.

World Vision

World Vision is a well-known charity organization in Singapore and the whole world with a presence in more than 100 countries. It is dedicated to helping children, families, and communities to get out of poverty and deal with the root causes of injustice through the charity programs for child support in Singapore . Though it is a Christian group, it serves all people regardless of religion, gender, race, or ethnicity. It works following the federal model, acknowledging developed countries’ ability to support people from developing nations. The organisation also holds disaster relief operations following the International Code of Conduct for providing aid during emergencies.

World Vision’s operation in Singapore started in the 1970s after its efforts to help the boat people trying to flee Vietnam when Saigon fell to communist forces. In 1984, the World Vision’s Child Sponsorship Programme was transferred from its Hong Kong office to its centre in Singapore. The group is famous for its child sponsorship programme. For just $45 a month, anyone can sponsor a child and provide him/her with basic needs and education. Apart from sponsoring a child, you can also help the organisation by making a general donation and donating to areas of need.

To get in touch with World Vision Singapore, you may send them an email at enquiries@worldvision.org.sg.

Ways to Raise Funds for your PTA

December 17, 2019February 13, 2020 Jayne2 Comments

Since Sausage starting at primary school, I’ve done my best to get involved as many PTA events as I can. This has meant chaperoning many discos, helping out with Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Christmas sales, setting up stalls at the school fete and as many other things as I’ve been able to get involved with, time wise. In September, the parents received a letter, letting us know that the remaining two members of the PTA were stepping down as the committee and my sister-in-law and I decided that it would be too sad to see the PTA close down all together so we would take on the role of Chair and Deputy Chair.

Since we took on the roles we’ve had brainstorming sessions with other members of the PTA and have come up with lots of fundraising ideas that we want to try over the next 12 months. Our current commitments to the school include keeping the minibus running, but we also want to provide them with some new school playground equipment such as climbing frames so that the kids can make better use of the outdoor space. Today, I thought I’d share with you some of the fundraising ideas that we’ve come up with so far, so they might inspire you to help raise funds for your child’s School.

Embroidery and Name Tags

There are several companies which will give you a percentage of sales when you share their leaflets for your parents. Labels and embroidery are the most common examples and they allow parents to get all of their labelling needs covered while the school benefits from the commission.

100 Club

The principle of a 100 club is that you have a list number one to 100 and parents are able to buy a number and pay £1 per month for this number. At the end of each month, you draw a winner from each of the 100 names and you split the £100 usually 50/50 between the parent and the school. Obviously if you have a much larger school and want more parents to get involved you can have more numbers but do bear in mind that the main work involved with the 100 club is ensuring that each payment has been made from each parents bank account every month.

Enterprise Evenings

Lots of the parents but our primary school are self-employed and run their own businesses, many of which revolve around crafty endeavours or selling things. Enterprise evenings are fairly simple, and there are two ways that you can make a profit. The first way is to simply sell table space so that each business pays a fee to rent a table and then any profits they make, they keep for themselves. The other way is to agree a profit share for the evening so any profit made per table is split with the school but you don’t generally charge for the space. The latter option is more difficult to arrange because obviously it relies on everyone being honest about how much profit they made in the evening.

Movie Nights

If your school has a decent sized hall with a projector, running a movie night is a really simple way to make some money. Advertise it so that kids bring their own bean bags, chairs, blankets etc and all parents have to do you drop them off to watch a film for a couple of hours and then collect them at the end. Our school has its own popcorn machine so we’re planning to offer a bag of popcorn in the ticket price, but as this is cheap to make it shouldn’t affect our profits too much. You can also set up refreshment stands and sell food and drink if you want to.

Open Mic Night

This one might not work if your school is small, however our primary school has almost 1000 pupils and therefore lots and lots of grown-ups who are willing to get involved with stuff. You can charge people to come along on watch and encourage everyone to bring their own food and drink so that everything you make is purely profit. It’s a really fun way to get the adults involved with the school community and you could even combine it with the movie night so that those who need childcare have it built in with their night out.

Collecting Coins

This one takes relatively little effort and is something that you can get the whole school involved with. All you need to do is take a decent sized container to each classroom and ask them to fill it with as many 1p, 2p, or 5p coins. Then, at the end of term, you count up which class has the most money in the pot and the class with the highest amount of money raised wins a prize. You can make the prize something like lollies for the whole class if it’s a summer event which means you’re out loud will be minimal and everything else will be profit for the PTA.

If you have any other ideas that you think would be good for raising money for the school PTA and our outdoor play equipment, please leave me a comment below as we’re always trying to come up with fresh ways to raise funds.

Charity

Help Stop Companies from Robbing the Poor

November 1, 2017 JayneLeave a comment

Most of my readers know that I have strong socialist values and feel really strongly about equal rights for all people. Our current government has created a culture of keeping the rich rich and the poor poor, which has perpetuated food bank usage in the UK, huge levels of homelessness and the highest levels of child poverty in hundreds of years. What you might not know is that the huge tax-dodging companies which operate in the UK have a huge effect on poverty in other countries too. Companies dodge approximately £78 billion in tax in poor countries annually, stripping them of funds for vital services. Oxfam reveal that just a third of this amount would be enough to cover the healthcare that could prevent the needless deaths of eight million mothers, babies and children. Oxfam has created a powerful video to show what’s happening:

Showing it in such stark, literal terms of patients being directly deprived may seem provocative, especially when we see the part with the baby in an incubator, but the cold, hard facts are that this is exactly what happens when companies refuse to pay their taxes.

It makes me sick that even the lowest paid workers are expected to pay income tax and tax on almost everything they buy, but companies which turn over billions in profit get let off. I can’t even begin to get my head around how unfair that is and it’s time that we started demanding that the Government make changes.

Oxfam has started a petition and is asking people to follow this link and add your name to a list of people who wants to see changes happen NOW. It will take two minutes of your time and could make a difference, not only to us here in the UK, but also to people living in enforced poverty all over the world.

Do leave me a comment below if you have anything to say about the campaign or just to let me know you’re adding your name to the petition. I’m heading there to sign my name right now.

Charity

Helping Refugees Through the Hardest Times

July 24, 2017 JayneLeave a comment

I think we can all agree that the past few years have not been great for ‘feelgood’ news. It barely seems like a day passes between stories of tragedy, war and human suffering and it’s something which weighs heavily on my mind during those idle moments when your brain wanders. Some of the images I’ve seen on TV and in newspapers in recent years will probably stick with me forever.

I heard a quote, a few years back, from American TV hero Fred Rodgers and I find it helpful to remember when the news gets too much. He said:

“For me, as for all children, the world could have come to seem a scary place to live. But I felt secure with my parents, and they let me know that we were safely together whenever I showed concern about accounts of alarming events in the world.

There was something else my mother did that I’ve always remembered: “Always look for the helpers,” she’d tell me. “There’s always someone who is trying to help.” I did, and I came to see that the world is full of doctors and nurses, police and firemen, volunteers, neighbors and friends who are ready to jump in to help when things go wrong.”

I thought of this quote again when I heard about ESSN and their new way of helping refugees. The Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) is a programme that provides cash to the most vulnerable refugee families living in Turkey. They can spend the cash on whatever they decide is most important. It could be food, fuel, rent or medicine.

They’ve teamed up with twelve European illustrators have come together to produce delightful new work to portray how seemingly mundane items, from toothbrushes to teddy bears, mean so much to a refugee child. The series of illustrations aims to promote the work the European Union (EU) and United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) are doing with their ESSN (Emergency Social Safety Net) Programme, which helps the most vulnerable refugee families find their feet again. Here are some of my favourite illustrations from the collection:

Work like this is SO important; the mainstream media seems to go out of its way to completely dehumanise refugees, to the point where people were totally unmoved by images of dead children after their boat sank, escaping from Syria. It’s easier for people to be unwelcoming of these people than it is for them to contemplate the suffering and misery they must have endured to make them risk leaving their homes. These children are no different to our own and things like a book or a teddy or a skipping rope are just as important to them as they are to ANY little boy or girl.

If you’d like to know more about ESSN or would like to see some of the other artworks which have been created for this campaign, do head over to the site and take a look.

Charity

Everyone Jump For Pudsey! #JumpForPudsey

October 20, 2016 JayneLeave a comment

Pudsey bbc children in need When I was a kid, Pudsey and Children in Need was one of the highlights of the year – we’d get to do fun things like non-uniform days and bake sales at school to raise money for Children in Need and we’d all huddle round the telly for the night when it was shown on BBC One. Children in Need is now in it’s THIRTY SIXTH year (I know, it’s older than me!) having raised over £600 million since 1980 and this year they want us all to get a bit more active to help with the fundraising. Whether it’s leaps, launches, bounds or hops; the goal is for the UK to spring its way to one million jumps, turning jumps in to pounds. Boots is calling on people to get jumping with friends or family, at work or at home next week and in particular on Jump Day on the 26^th of October.

The guys at Children in Need said “Helping to reach the one million jumps will be thousands of gymnasts from up and down the country who will be taking part in Jump for Pudsey challenges being staged in British Gymnastics registered clubs and leisure centres. British Gymnastics has also created five easy jumps challenges for adults and children to do wherever they are, which can be found on boots.com and in the Jump Journal – available free from most Boots UK stores.

British artistic gymnast and five-time Olympic medal winner Max Whitlock is lending his support to the campaign to get as many people jumping as possible. Max says: “I think the Jump for Pudsey campaign is a brilliant idea! It’s great to have a campaign that not only raises money for such an incredible charity but also helps people keep fit whilst having fun. Even just a small amount of exercise like jumping can make a significant difference in helping people become healthier and happier. I’m sure lots of people will enjoy taking part and I know lots of gymnasts will be joining in and challenging each other to raise as much money as possible.” Many of Max’s fellow top Olympic gymnasts will also be showing their support for Jump for Pudsey by encouraging the public to get involved.”

Once you’ve done your jumps you can head over to the Boots totaliser to log all of your efforts with them and help get the total to one million! Jumping for Pudsey is such a simple and fun way to get involved, stay active, and most importantly raise money for disadvantaged kids in the UK and we’ve been getting our jump on in aid of this excellent cause, as well as roping in a whole bunch of Sausage and BB’s friends from school – take a look at some of our jumps below:

via GIPHY

pudsey1 pudsey2 pudsey3

If you need a bit of inspiration into how to get a bit of bounce in your step, British Gymnastics have put together a fabulous guide to encourage you to jump, which you can see here…

Jump for Pudsey

People are being encouraged to share their leaps with #JumpForPudsey and make a donation of £3 by texting JUMP to 70313, or via mydonate.bt.com/events/jumpforpudsey. You can also find out more at boots.com/childreninneed.

We’d love to see your jumps too, so don’t forget to share all of your tweets, instagrams and Facebook posts with us so that we can follow along.