Doing Stuff For Charity
9th Apr 2013
A friend emailed me recently to let me know about a relative of his who is just about to embark on a mammoth cycle journey from South Korea back to the UK, raising money for charity along the way. He’s going to be keeping a Blog as he goes.
http://www.journeytothewestcountry.com/#!bio/c66t
Sounds like a great trip. He’s not a seasoned cyclist, but is going to go anyway.
Another friend sent me a similar message about a young relative of his who is doing something similar on his way back from South America. He’s not exactly keeping a Blog, but he has a donations page:
http://gogetfunding.com/project/cycling-for-congregacion-de-hermanas-de-calcuta
Yet another friend is about to embark on a massive run from here in the Peak District to Everest Base Camp. He’ll be Blogging along the way.
It has got me thinking. Are more people taking on these sort of challenges, and if so, are they doing them because they have the confidence due to the fact that they have hear of or know others who have done similar things via their Blogs, or are we simply hearing about them because of the Blogs? Many years ago my wife and I contemplated various adventures along these lines, but in the end opted for a round-the-world backpacker style trip. Would we have thought differently had we known half a dozen people who had had the courage to up sticks and go and do something truly memorable? I suspect that we would have been a lot more likely to have done so. In the end our decision came down to time – we had four and a half months for our trip and the round-the-world ticket seemed like the best use of that time. That’s what we thought at the time. We had a fantastic trip, but I am sure that we could have worked out something more adventurous. The concept of getting people to sponsor you to do such trips is also an interesting one. I’ve no idea what percentage of the UK population give regular donations to charity, but I have read some pretty startling figures for the US where a significant number of people tithe 10% of their earnings to good causes. If you already have standing orders set up to feed into your charitiesof choice then you’d be forgiven for not sponsoring any of these endeavours, but most of the trips have a fundraising element and people seem happy to donate small sums to a good cause. A week on Saturday I’m running a 10 mile road race for a local cancer charity that I am patron to (Challenge Cancer Through Adventure). I ran it last year, but didn’t raise any money. This year I thought I would set up a donations page and posted a couple of messages on Facebook. It’s hardly cycling back from South Korea or running to Everest Base Camp, but the message is still the same – it’s a straight forward method of crowd funding which people can dip into if they like the sound of the cause.