The people over at Social Innovation Camp have selected the ideas to be developed at their camp next month. Ideas include something to sort out junk mail, a way to find out who’s on holiday and where, so you can get them to do useful stuff like finding a plumber to fix the drains at an orphanage (I can’t even begin to explain how unlikely that could be of any use to any of the orphanages I’ve seen), a site to help you navigate your way around places with consideration to ability needs or escorting young children, an idea to get people out jogging to drop in and visit elderly people and run errands for them (seriously!), and an online marketplace for people who grow local produce. Also potentially shortlisted is something to include staff in making their company carbon neutral, a (ridiculous) idea to make setting up a social enterprise a one click process, an online system to help you make preparations for your death, and a scheme to help people join together to share the costs of investing in renewable energy.

Of all of them its the vegetable marketplace idea (called Vegsy) that I can see some real use for although getting enough people signed up to make it useful seems highly ambitious.

For most of the others I’m bemused as to what the perceived social benefit will be or how realistic it is that they can actually be of use. What I took from the last Social Innovation Camp was that to be successful you need a very simple idea. The last winner was Enabled by Design which aims to link the needs of people who use adapted equipment with designers - technically its the sort of thing that could be put together in just a few days, getting it used of course is a harder challenge and I assume that’s what has taken (more…)

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If you have a negative number and you want to make it into a positive one you need to add a larger positive number to do so: -10 needs +11 to make it =1

I wonder if the same applies to other aspects of life. For example if you have a negative image of young people do you need a larger positive image to redress the balance? If so I wonder then on the wisdom of the Barnardo’s Children in Trouble Campaign.

The campaign includes a very well produced film showing hunters hunting down children while narrating comments that adults have apparently actually said about children. They’ve had a brilliant publicity launch - I heard Barnardo’s Chief Executive discussing the campaign on Radio 4 this morning, and even this lowly blog was sent pre-publicity well in advance with links to the survey findings, film and so on.

So a very impressive and well put together campaign - and one with a message I very much agree with. But somehow it doesn’t feel comfortable. Obviously its not designed to make you feel comfortable - you should feel uncomfortable thinking that adults speak so negatively about children and young people, but that’s not the cause of my unease. Instead I wonder whether actually this kind of negativity can reinforce further negative attitudes, hence my maths lesson at the start! -10 + -5 = -15, not good!

A more practical example can be heard in the short Radio 4 interview with children from Birmingham about their reaction to how adults view them having seen the film. You start to get the sense of a battle between children and adults. Undoubtedly there is a battle, and always will be, but how do you best go about bridging the divide - positive activities to bring people together? or hard hitting campaigns showing how bad the other side is?

What I think is really sad about this isn’t that some adults do feel this way (and it is only some if you consider that the 2021 people that took part in the survey accounts for 0.003% of the actual adult population in the UK), but that because of the way the media drives our society a large charity acting in the best interests of children feels the only way they can get good publicity for their cause is to try and shock.

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edit: Thanks to Debbie Long for pointing to this film to redress the balance a little…

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In between 4th birthday parties, trips to the local theme park, a firework party, being generously donated several pumpkins by a nearby farmer and working out what to do with them, I have managed to get the design done for The YoMo Foundation Christmas donation voucher.

Actually its more of a card. The idea is that if you are struggling to buy a present for somebody but feel obliged to ‘just get them something’, instead of wasting your money on something they won’t really appreciate, you can make a donation on their behalf to support childrens school fees in Malawi and demonstrate your gift by printing off the card.

I know charity Xmas cards aren’t original but thats not really where my original thinking lay. When I came back from our first trip to Malawi I was chatting about the experience with my old boss and the realisation of how wasteful we actually are and that I’d been struck too when I got back at all the adverts on TV for supporting pets, sponsoring animals, buying your dog toys & so on. His reply was that it does say something when supermarkets dedicate a whole aisle just for feeding pets. Now I’m conscious of not losing a whole load of pet lovers here so I’ll tread carefully, but I did (and still do) wonder what our annual expenditure is on animals and how this compares to the money donated to support people in developing nations?

I’m only going to lose an argument on the relative merits of money spent on animals/pets (in the UK at least) but I hope I can convince nearly everyone that we do waste money on many things that either aren’t needed, or in the case of some Christmas gifts, aren’t really appreciated.

So heres a chance to have a think before you do go and buy those novelty socks or fancily packaged beer kit…. if you don’t think it will really be appreciated make a small donation instead that really will be appreciated. I can’t emphasise enough that I mean REALLY appreciated - this very honestly is about supporting some of the very worst off children in one of the poorest countries in the world to have an opportunity that they will not have unless we can raise funding to support their fees.

I’m working on a website for The YoMo Foundation at the moment that will have more about this but its going to take a little while to put together. In the meantime if you want more information just get in touch with me and I’ll very happily chat more.

For now if you’d like to make a donation you can do so by…..

Donating online here:

or writing a cheque payable to “The YoMo Foundation”

and posting to:

The YoMo Foundation
Suite 218
29-30 Horse Fair
Banbury
Oxon
OX16 0BW

Once done please head over to SCRIBD and print off the card/voucher on to some suitably nice card or stiff paper. I am willing to print off copies on behalf of anyone that wants to make several donations - if so let me know by sending an email to info@yomo.co.uk (they’ll even be ‘professionally’ folded by my ‘professional folding machine’! - no seriously they will!)

Link to download the card is here

Note that the card has been designed to print on A4 paper. Printing is doublesided (as in print page 1, take it out, swap it over & print page 2), and there are two cards per sheet of A4 (folding down to A6 size).

If you want an authentic Malawian card you can also order some of these!

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Tags: Africa & Overseas, campaign, poverty, schools, Society & Issues, ya

Not because he’s suffering in the credit crunch Robert is preparing to run the Madrid Marathon in 2010. Part of that preparation includes a challenge to run an equivalent distance to get to Madrid (1,300 miles) in his training. You can see how he’s getting on towards the 1,300 miles (currently he’s just about reached the M6 near the Manchester Junction!) by clicking on the online map showing his equivalent progress .

Roberts target is to raise £2,038 which will support Claire House Childrens Hospice (who support children with life threatening/limiting conditions).

A brilliant cause and a big challenge - read more on Roberts blog and please do support him through the Just Giving page.

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Tags: Society & Issues

Apparently everyone has dreams - its just that some of us don’t remember them. That’ll be me then! I have no idea what I was dreaming about last night but first thing this morning I was thinking up loads of ways that values have changed in our society recently (within my memory anyway) and how that must have an effect on young people (and their parents) - for example:

Old Values	New Values
Children should be seen & not heard	Young People ‘have a voice’ & should be listened to
Corporal punishment, slapping, the cane	I’ll sue you if you do (or phone childline)
Less than a handful of TV stations	Hundreds! Online media, mobile phones
Police men dragging you home to be punished	I’ll sue you if you do!
Fuzzy occasional films of news from abroad	Instant right in the thick of the action news reports, constant updates of disasters, wars, murders etc. in the news
Relatively few ‘famous’ people	Reality TV, self publishing, myspace, short term instant ‘celebrity’
Holidays at the seaside	Holidays abroad
Walking to school, walking to the shops	Driving everywhere, shopping in supermarkets
Playing in the streets	The ’streets’ are not safe, you need to be ‘hard’ & ’streetwise’
Sony walkman & taping off the radio	Ipods, mp3 & mp4 players, mobile phones, music is free??!
Fish & Chips (take away)	McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Nando’s, Kentucky etc. etc. etc.
Casio calculator watch	Be honest its still cool aint it?!

No doubt some of you who’ve been around a bit longer have seen much more change - how do you think values will change in the next 10 years though?……..

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Picked up from over on Gallomanor - V the volunteering ’super charity’ are rebranding and launching yet another campaign adding to the huge amount of money they must have already spent on glossy campaigns.

Apparently they’ve now decided that young people don’t think volunteering so instead they’re going to call it ‘doing favours’!

um does that sound anything like Millennium Volunteers?

“right volunteering is not cool - so lets say that cool things are volunteering”

“er but some of that stuff isn’t actually volunteering - I mean they’re just playing football or baby sitting their little brother”

“no, no, those things do benefit other people so really we can count it as volunteering can’t we?!”,

“er I suppose so but doesn’t that mean we haven’t really increased volunteering we’re just calling stuff they’re already doing something different?”

“well yes but at least we can write some impressive reports and keep the funding coming in….”

OK I’m maybe being over cynical - but it hard not to over such ridiculous wastes of funding. They may be right that ‘volunteering’ isn’t cool - but rebranding, giving it a new name still isn’t going to suddenly result in surges of young people running out to volunteer. Maybe if more effort had been given to developing more rounded programmes, that funding could have helped support young people to become genuinely more community minded. But instead this simple “get them volunteering and they’ll be good citizens” won’t work - it needs a cultural shift, not fancy films and marketing.

For all the money that has been spent they might have been better just giving every young person in England a holiday job - “here you go I’ll pay you £50 for doing something nice for somebody else each Sunday this month!” At least then young people would have benefited more than all those involved with putting these campaigns together.

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This made me smile - I called in to our local shop tonight. It was dark and as I got to the shop there was a gang of young people hanging around - some of them sat on a grass embankment next to the shop, a couple by the doorway and a couple around a motorcycle.

As I got close one of the young people dashed inside the shop and when I entered was running around it. As he passed me by he said “don’t worry he’ll be here in a  minute”, shortly after the shop assistant appeared and apologised because he’d been out the back clearing boxes. As I left the shop the lad that had gone in to find the assistant held the door open for me - I thanked him and left.

It made me smile because like most people on getting to the shop I wondered what they were all up to - of course most probably nothing at all - just hanging around where theres some light while a couple tinkered with the motorbike, and as it seemed looking out for the shop too.

It reminded me of the Buzz Off campaign against mosquito devices and the Downing Steet E-Petition which only got a pretty rubbish 149 supporters. Presumably the local shop here won’t be installing any anyway!

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75% of young people involved in the UK Youth Parliament apparently believe the planet can only survive for another 50 years in its current state. (Taken from a survey held at their ‘annual sitting’.)

We’ve done bits of work with various factions of the UK Youth Parliament but I’ve never been involved with any of their annual sittings - I would expect though that given these are young people in a role to represent the views and concerns of other young people, that when they do meet to discuss such important issues they get the support of experts in the topics they discuss. So presumably when discussing environmental attitudes they were able to grill experts about what those risks are and to ask fundamental questions like is the planet really in danger? or is it that the planet will probably survive but the human race may not, and so on.

Assuming this is the case isn’t it a bit surprising that in the survey the person who apparently the UKYP members feel has the most power to influence young people regarding climate change is………………. David Beckham?!

Now in terms of media influence it may still be understandable to choose a high profile celebrity - but I can’t help but wonder whether theres a responsibility here for young people representing others to be able to take their inspiration from experts in the relevant fields - and to then inform other young people about who those experts are so that they base their decisions/opinions on credible information, not media puppets.

You can see more about the UKYP Annual Sitting on their website

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