Non-prophet week: Update 3

After bake sales, silences and bucket shakes, the last of our Non-prophet Week events was the Donation Station, set up to collect unwanted items that would then be donated to Barnardo’s. All told, we didn’t quite get the response that we’d hoped for, despite the very obvious enthusiasm on show. Although plenty of people still generously donated their spare change to the bucket, over the course of the two hours that we were open, we only managed to get a few bits of clothing.

I think this was largely down to poor promotion of the event on our part; whilst there were plenty of posters up around campus, we could have done more to promote the event beforehand so that people could plan ahead. Short of giving us the clothes of their backs there was little people could do for us on the day however keen they were to support us! 

That said however, coupled with the few bits and bobs from the Donation Station and the stuff I’d accumulated at home, we did still end up with four full bags worth of stuff! Judi (left), the manager of the Barnardo’s charity shop in Banbury, and her assistant, Pauline (right), were pleased as punch when I turned up this morning and even graciously offered to pose for a photo. 

One of our members, Emma Moseley had managed to cajole some of her flat mates to make a donation but by the time they’d got there we’d already packed up! Their donations will be collected on Monday and taken to Barnardo's next weekend.

Here’s a quick roundup of where we all are with the rest of the fund-raising totals:

Emma’s sitting pretty at £276 so far for her fundraising for Volunteers for Eductational Support and Learning.  Although her sponsored silence is over she’s still taking donations!

I’ve raised £80 online and £40 offline so far for my runs for Amnesty International, the routes  from Wednesday to Friday are below. The runs have been strange because I’ve alternated between pleasant runs and decent times of around 23 minutes (like Thursday and today) to absolutely awful slogs of 26 minutes (like yesterday), where it felt like sawing my legs off with a rusty spoon would have been easier and less painful. I still can’t wrap my head around how Eddie Izzard managed 43 marathons in 51 days! 

Including proceeds from the two bakes sales and the random change we’ve managed to collect, we estimate that our fundraising bucket must have had around £70 in it by Friday afternoon. The grand total from our bucket will also include a donation from the Birmingham Skeptics in the Pub very generously offered £50 from the profits from their last talk to our societies’ funding raising total! We have now handed over our bucket to Aston RAG who will count the money, split it 50/50 and raise two cheques for Book Aid International and One World Action at the beginning of next week. 

Finally, it’s still early days for Jack Hooker, but he’s raised £30 on his way towards a final target of £2440 as he attempts to climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for Childreach International.

Not sure what the exact total raised by the Aston Humanists will be just yet, but I’m pretty sure we’ve broken the £500 barrier!