I feel a little guilty doing this but…

I could give endless apologies for doing this, but I feel I should try nonetheless. Along with the studies for my final school exams that are currently keeping me hidden away from blogging, I’m busy trying to finish my fundraising for Project Trust. (see here for info)

This unfortunately leads me to try my luck at advertising my final large(ish) fundraiser, and maybe, just maybe, get a tiny donation from one or two people.

So this last fundraiser is a nice simple sponsored run. I won’t be fit enough in time to run any of the marathons before I go (already missed the London one), so instead i am planning to run round a local reservoir called Grapham water. As that would be considerably easier than running a marathon, I’m only giving myself an hour to do it in.

If I make enough money from this event, it will be the finishing line (excuse the entirely intended pun) for my fundraising, and I will be an incredibly happy, relieved and possibly slightly terrified (it does after all mean i’ll be on my way to China very soon afterwards…) fundraiser.

so, here is a link to the ‘Virginmoneygiving’ page i’ve set up for the event, in case there are any of you out there with a giant bag of generosity hidden away somewhere. In advance, I can’t thank you enough if you do give even the smallest donation.

And to those who are annoyed at me for trying to essentially get money out of you for fundraising, I apologise. Please please please don’t be too annoyed.

Oh, and as my exams will be over in 6 weeks, its not too long until I return to post something more interesting. Yay!

Fundraising calls for sacrifices…

Today was a rather terrifying day for me and heralded quite a change in appearance…

I got my hair shaved off to raise money for my journey to China to teach English for a year. I had (almost wrote have-I haven’t quite grasped the concept of now being nearly bald yet) very long hair and always have had fairly long hair, but now its all gone in order to bring me one step closer to my fundraising target. Just to give you a little idea of just how much a drastic change this was for me, look at this…

I Can’t say I’m a big fan of my new appearance, but sacrifices need to be made when you need to somehow raise over £5000.

To those who are wishing for a new post that is a bit more creative than the last few, I assure you that they are on their way. 🙂

The beginning of a hard but exciting journey.

This post is going to be completely different from any that I have posted before, so if you were hoping for a poem or thought, sorry about that.

Instead today I am talking about the beginning of a fundraising journey. In a year and a half, I will be heading off to the other side of the world to China to teach English for a charitable organisation called Project Trust. I will be living as part of a Chinese community for a whole year before I go to university to study languages, but obviously to embark on such incredible opportunities is not free-I have to raise the rather large sum of £5400 (don’t worry, i’m not here to beg for donations). So i thought “why don’t I start occasionally writing about my fundraising on my blog?” so now here is my first fundraising post.

The first thing i’m doing is perhaps going to be the most stressful of all-writing to charitable trusts to ask for donations towards my project. The first problem with this, is that although I will be a volunteer for an organisation, I am fundraising for myself and not the organisation, making me appear to be an individual. Trusts really don’t like individuals. And yet Project Trust informs its volunteers that we can make alot of our target from writing to trusts; Some in the past have even made the entire amount! The tricky job of finding eligible trusts involves hours crouched over a desk with a trust directory madly scribbling down the ones that may give donations, but even then I am sure I will end up writing accidentally to many that I don’t fill the criteria for. But luckily, fundraising gets more fun after the early stages.

I will probably post the occasional updates for my fundraising, but not so often that it detracts from the main purposes of my blog. If any of you guys have experience with fundraising and have some great ideas, let me know- every bit of help is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!