Hiya Will, Yes, I would be happy tell you about our fundraising.

Our first efforts were unsuccessful. We tried at first to apply for funding through ‘Bangladesh Welfare Association Board’, they could not help us so we decided to write to lots of well established companies and ask them for sponsorship, but again we had no joy. We then decided to try fundraising.

The idea came up to do charity dinner events. Because I have many contacts in the Indian catering industry, I was able to arrange meetings to discuss and agree on prices where we will benefit from the events and make money for our project.

We had few meetings, then agreed on charging £15.00 per head, we take £10.00, the restaurant takes £5.00, this included a three or four course meal. In total we did three charity events, two Indian meals and one Italian. All included entertainment and our entertainers were from the local community and local school giving young disadvantaged children a chance to be recognised in society.

We originally had the idea of taking young people with us on the project, but this idea failed as they showed a lack of commitment in the end. Also, the project planning was for 10 months and our original target was to make £20K - there was no way we could have achieved this target, but we did manage to raise enough to get the three project leaders, myself, Gary and Lesley, to go South Africa.

I believe, if we had extended our project planning to 1-to-1.5 years we would have raised more and taken more people with us.

After the Charity Meals, we then did a Bingo Night and a Women Information Day, where I invited all the statutory services in the local Bangladeshi community to promote their service and took the opportunity to cook food and sell them on the day. We went round to take-away shops to provide us with food for the day and also ended up raising money going door to door to all the local takeaways to fund our trip.

We babysat, charging £10.00 per head, looking after my own nieces and nephews for half a day.

We held Raffle Prize Day at our workplace. We wrote to local stores and were able to obtain lots and lots of raffle prizes for a raffle event. We were also able to get toys/educational materials and many more items from shopdirect.com who did a big publicity on this for us because one of my work supervisors also worked part time for them.
I also went on live on local radio and advertised our plight on Burnley Express. Lots of personal friends gave donations towards the cost of our ticket etc.

Members of my family each paid £50.00 or £100.00 each towards the crates we decided to take with us with all the charity donations for the kids in Africa..

I could go on and on…

We have a blog we created before we went for family/friends to stay updated on what we were doing daily in South Africa. It has posts on from people making comments and lots of pictures. The blog address is: http://street-kids-knysna.blogspot.com

I got my dad to sponsor hoodies for us, where it had our names on, Knysna 2009 and our slogan "where dreams are made and lives are changed".. we wore them to airport and back and throughout our placement too.. everybody was well impressed by this...!

We are in the process since we have been back of aiming to support two young lads from the youth centre who have been selected for the Homeless World cup in Milan. We are doing a press release for our own Lancashire County Council and local schools and Burnley Express asking people to sponsor and donate football kits, boots (etc) and also to try finance applications for passports, birth certificate, flight costs to Milan and so on. We hope to also go to Milan in September to support these two local lads play soccer.

We are also doing several other presentations and promotions to aid the youth centre's wish list, so that we can send essential items for the centre and for the kids.

Thanks for your time.
Hena