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You don’t have to leave the UK to make a difference in Haiti

By Katrina Crew
January 28, 2010 at 4:07 pm

This fact was brought home to me as I was wandering around the City of London looking for lunch today.

I noticed two guys on stationary bikes outside Cass Business School riding their hearts out while sporting wigs and blasting the best of 80s pop. Two others were standing there with boxes covered with pictures of Haiti.

They’re raising money for the DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal by cycling 250 miles – nearly the distance from London to Newcastle.

Just like the relief effort in Haiti, they’re a multi-national fundraising team. Thomas Newman and Matt Slade are English, and Raphael Gindre and Augustin Renoul are French. Jos Pol and Vinny Coile (who weren’t there when I stopped by) are Dutch and Irish.

They’re all friends from Cass’ football team. They decided to raise money for Haiti because another student at the school is Haitian and she sent round an email asking people to do what they could.

Despite their aching bums, they were thrilled to be on the bikes. “The response from people passing by has been brilliant,” Tom (pictured, right, in the black wig) said. “We were really surprised by how much you can organise in two days when you put your mind to it and get such amazing support.”

Raphael (in the blonde wig) added: “Cass has fed us and given us coffee, Virgin Active let us use the bikes, and the costumes were rented for free.”

You don’t need quads of steel to raise money. If, like me, it’s not muscle that makes your legs big, you can find other fundraising ideas on this blog. Another group of students at Cass organised Hats for Haiti, raising around £1,000 just by asking fellow students to wear a silly hat and make a donation.

If you’ve come up with clever ways of raising money for the appeal, leave a comment below and tell us about it.

Update: Tom emailed me, saying: “In the end we raised around £1,700 simply from the cycle-thon, the hat guys raised nearly £1,500, bringing the total for the DEC to over £3000. Not bad for a day’s cycling!”

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Tags: fundraising ideas, fundraising tips, Haiti, Haiti earthquake, haiti earthquake appeal, relief

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Emergencies, Fundraising and events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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