get involved / Take the Step. Be the Change.

Why I'm part of it
It all started last year July when I watched a documentary on BBC3 called: Who Is Nelson Mandela? I was shocked when I found out what he had been through but I still wanted to know more. So I got my mum to buy me his first book, A Long Walk To Freedom, and I found out a lot of facts about him, both funny and sad. I found out online that he had a charity called the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund and automatically I wanted to get involved!

How I got involved
Later on in the year I realized that Nelson Mandela's birthday is coming up very soon. So I asked my friends Kimberley Okoye and Mabel Collins to help get the message get around the school and also celebrate it. So eventually we started coming up with ideas on how to fundraise. Us 3 year 8 girls (now in year 9) had fun planning what to do and even did things over the weekend!

What we did to raise funds
As July dawned we became under pressure to get a few things sorted, but with a few obstacles we succeeded! We got Nelson Mandela t-shirts made and stickers which we sold around the school that day, we also managed to get half of our non-uniform day money to the charity. And finally we sold some sweets and drinks and in total we made over £450!

What's happening now
Our fundraising for the Nelson Mandela Children's fund is still ongoing. Marian Ayo came to our school with details on the project "Take the Step. Be the Change." which is to help raise money to build a children's hospital in South Africa. I was shocked to find out that the WHOLE of Africa has only 4 children's hospitals but ecstatic that we are saving millions of lives by building another. Kim, Mabel and I are very motivated by this life changing project and we'd LOVE to be a part of it.

We also will be starting the essay task and we will be asking people from different years of our school to take part. The essay is called 'What would you do with £1000 to help the lives of less privileged children?'

Our project started very small but we have come so far. We'll continue to think of ideas to raise money and hopefully it'll get crazier as we go along. I'm determined to succeed and raise £1,000 not only for ourselves, but for all those children, our generation that is out there!