Piquant Charitable Thoughts

Rest in Peace John Butler, thank you

2012-01-28T02:38:00.001-08:00

When I joined Home Start Hillingdon early last year, it was mainly from the perspective of having something nearby so that I can do something for the local community. As well as that, the idea that the charity is a bit public funded, quite a bit foundation and private funded, we have 40-50 volunteers and we touch up to 100 families every year is very good. When I joined, the charity was in deep financial trouble and if we didn't sort it out, the charity would have closed. This was just 1 month after I joined. Plus then we lost almost 60% of our trustees for a variety of reasons and we ended up with just two trustees, John and I. John was previously the treasurer and then he became the chair. I couldn't do it, I am already stretched with the other charities that I am involved in and refused to become the chair.

John worked his butt off to ensure we have a good financial foundation, he drove us getting good funding from the council and made the business case and ensured we are now in a sustainable element. We spoke to so many people, got stakeholders to buy in and we were successful. This was when John was unwell and he was in hospital pretty much the last quarter of last year. Very brave of him.

And then came the shocker in December, he resigned saying that he has to go back to hospital and then early this week, I heard the shocking news that he had passed on. I was seriously shocked, he was very healthy, about 38 years of age, a practising lawyer and he was finishing his MBA, writing his dissertation, very sporty and eating good food. He apparently had skin cancer and it became virulent and just in a matter of weeks he died.

We had a board meeting last week and I spoke about all what he had done for the charity. Frog in the throat time. Really feel bad about his loss. But this is the amazing thing about people like John. They get about their jobs and do so much for the community, over and above what one would have expected. They do not get recognition, they do not get the kudo’s, they are not publicly welcomed or congratulated, but they spend hours on doing things that help others, they are passionate about the downtrodden, the sick, the disabled, the ill, the poor, the mentally disturbed of the society. That’s the power of this society, how people quietly go about helping others, without expecting any return.

But I felt I had to write about these quiet people today. My father is another one of this kind of people, I have been speaking to him frequently these couple of weeks ever since my aunt died, of cancer as well. He was sobbing on the phone, poor chap. He was very close to her. She was also one of those quiet helpful kinds. And she used to make some brilliant dishes. Its not a good feeling to hear your father cry but such is life. So this week has been a very difficult one indeed.

So here’s to you, John Butler, I am sure you will be recognised in heaven for all the wonderful work you have done on earth. Thank you for all your help and all the families in Hillingdon who have been helped and will be helped more in the coming years will be cognisant of your brilliant work for the charity.

Rest in Peace.

Trustees and education

2011-12-10T11:25:00.001-08:00

We are advertising for more trustees at Home Start Hillingdon. Here’s one which went into the Women in Technology Group.

3 - Enthusiastic volunteer trustees required for Home-Start, the UK’s leading family support charity
Home-Start is the UK’s leading family support charity - they support families struggling to cope with young children who with serious problems such as mental illness, alcoholism etc. Home-Start train volunteers (who are themselves parents) who then work with social services, health, police, etc. to recover the family and avoid the children being put into care (each child in care costs up to £50,000) and Home-Start have managed to intervene in about 100 families per year over the last 12 years or so in Hillingdon. They have had a few trustee retirements recently and they would like to increase the number of trustees who have experience in fund raising. This is a high governance charity (since they work with children) and would appeal to people who want to gain board level experience of running a firm. They also have three MPs as their trustees and work closely with the local council. It would also ideally suit people who are within commuting distance of Hillingdon (north west London) as they hold their monthly meetings there and fund raising takes place in and around Hillingdon. In particular Home-Start Hillingdon would like to seriously increase the amount of technology they use - such as having revenue generating efforts through a web shop, having a better website, providing financial education to their families via mobile or e-learning, providing e-coaching, assisting the volunteers with knowledge sharing on the website, better Facebook/social media interaction etc. So somebody who has an interest in applying technology to assist and help fundraise would be ideal. Trustees can expect to spend around 12 hours a month on this rewarding role which enables much needed support for vulnerable families. For more information please contact Bhaskar Dasgupta, an existing Home-Start Hillingdon Trustee, on 07545 236 207 orbhaskar.dasgupta@hsbc.com or Tanya Link, Office Manager at Home-Start Hillingdon, on 01895 252804 or office@homestart-hillingdon.org.uk.

In other aspects relating to HSH, I had a nice meeting with LSE SIFE team and HSH Senior Coordinator and we agreed to push for more financial education training to our great volunteers and the families. We will do the first pilot run in Q1 2012 and then see how we can improve the offering. If it works out, it would be brilliant. The LSE SIFE team has been doing great, they have hooked up with Microsoft, did a great job in reviewing the current offerings for financial education out there and have got a full fledged team working on this. Good stuff chaps.

The background to this is important. The families which we help, are usually one step away from calamity and total disintegration. While the volunteers help in recovering these families, if we can give them some help with improving their financial condition, that would be brilliant. The kids wont have problems, well, not too many, but will be able to get the little bit extra. So I am very chuffed about this..

Trusted Trustees in Technical Test

2011-11-13T01:01:00.001-08:00

So we had our first meeting of the IT4CH charity where our brilliant technology ladies joined us. And they immediately made a huge difference. Its obvious that male trustees are utterly useless, and I include myself in that. We had brilliant ideas, we had great initiatives, we had spiffing discussions and we are going to move this forward. Hard. So brilliant stuff. One more trustee will join us soon, but in the interim, we should have fun.

But if there are anybody else who wants to help us? Volunteers, advisors, all welcome to join in and help. We are now starting to initiate projects relating to technology assisting sick children.

Mind you, we can also do with some trustees for the Home Start Hillingdon Charity. We are very happy, we have now confirmed funding from the council. Before people jump on this being a tax payer funded boondoggle, that is not true, the taxpayer money is used to fund a tiny team who train and manage up to 100 volunteers who actually deliver the benefits. Now if that is not community engagement, what is? I am very impressed with the girls in the charity and would appreciate having more trustees to help assist us to make this into something very good.

What else? Well, popped down to Swansea to lecture the MBA students, working with another university to potentially help them with an internship project, started this year’s mentorship with Manchester Business School, working with Essex on curriculum re-design and strategic positioning and finally i am sucking at Farsi, lol.

Two wins and a great feeling

2011-11-06T01:46:00.001-07:00

It was a good week indeed. Firstly, we received information that the funding for the HSH charity is now confirmed for another year at least and that is excellent news, we were on the verge of starting our close down process which would have been tragic for all the families in severe distress we support and our employees. But very happy about it and now we are going to really fix this place.

In particular, what I want to do is to launch an initiative where we train our families in proper financial management and literacy. This will improve their lives and be able to handle financials. Lack of financial management in families is one of the biggest causes and symptoms of family distress. Plus I should be able to get some funding for this. So I have engaged the LSE SIFE team to see if they would be able to find out what is out there in terms of financial education for families and explore ways that we can deliver thi provision. Should start hearing back from them soon.

I am having a chat with a chap from India who has done some amazing work with technology for social purposes, that is promising indeed, hopefully we will get some traction on that end and can get the IT4CH charity to fund it.

Found out some people in India who are working in the area of West Bengal and education, hopefully will be able to speak to them next week to determine some more local details on what can and cannot be done locally. Also speaking to somebody who is in the government to see what are the requirements that charities have to fulfil to operate in Didi’s state.

Tomorrow we have the launch of the Transformation Trust’s pilot with LSE SIFE with the trading futures game, that promises to be an excellent large impact initiative which, if it works out, will hit almost 800 schools and we will be able to improve financial literacy and hopefully get the students interested in trading.

Might also be helping to run a strategy session for STIR sometime this side of the year. I just hope my imminent knee operation doesnt muck up all these plans..

Good stuff, but I am personally very happy, extremely happy with the fact that HSH got funding, now we can make it sustainable and real high impact. Very very chuffed. It took a heck of a lot of huge effort, pain and work to get there. I was quite depressed and disheartened for several weeks, we lost people, we lost trustees and we lost hope (almost) but we succeeded. Pushed very hard, spoke to the MP’s, spoke to the council, spoke to funding agencies, spoke with the employees, constantly emailed and spoke with the trustees, big big job done by the Chairman. Big Society, here we come. Very happy.

Expanding, extending, setting up and pushing forward

2011-10-29T01:48:00.001-07:00

Curiously, we don't educate our kids in England in basic personal finance education. I still fail to understand the arguments against it, if there is one thing that people need to know, its personal finances, specially given the issues around too much credit, too little savings, too much debt, its not good. Within LSE SIFE, the chaps are trying to expand the usage of trading futures game, the game which helps to teach kids about economics and investments. Look here for what our cousins over the pond are doing: We should learn from them.

Virginia. When the state of Virginia moved to require financial literacy for its high school students, it was met with some resistance. Some felt that the material could be adequately covered in math and civics courses, while local school boards didn’t appreciate being told what to teach by the state. At this time though, Virginia does have a curriculum for middle and high school students that covers topics like opening an account at a financial institution, balancing a checkbook and filling out a loan application. Additional topics include consumer rights and responsibilities, debt management and understanding contracts.
Pennsylvania. One high school is adding a course, but doesn’t have the funding to hire more staff.
Maryland. Several years ago, a Maryland school board president expressed concern that a single course wouldn’t be enough to fully educate students about financial matters. He also pointed out that the course is relatively expensive at $600,000 — and he feared it wouldn’t be effective.
Missouri. Students in Missouri can take a personal finance class in the tenth, eleventh or twelfth grades. They study budgeting, banking services, and saving and investing. Other themes include credit and consumer skills. Also, goals and decision making as well as career planning are covered.
Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute is worried that the state’s lack of a requirement for economics and personal finance classes and inadequate number of trained teachers for the subjects will be detrimental to the residents and to Wisconsin’s overall economy.
Tennessee. Students here are expected to learn about money management, income, saving and investing, and credit and spending.
Utah. Utah teaches its students about basic budgeting, investments and even bankruptcy education.
Illinois. This state requires a consumer education course of 50 minutes a day for nine weeks for its high schools. The students are taught about credit scoring, income taxes and the role of consumers.
Georgia. They have an economics course that incorporates personal finance into one of its themes.

Got some major initiatives brewing with LSE SIFE as well, lets see what happens. SIFE Nottingham is also working with us to operationalise the training school with South Notts college with contributions of technology from the IT4CH charity. That’s very promising.

What else has been happening? Well, as I mentioned last week, I am hoping to help this new charity which does sterling work here in UK schools and helps to improve literacy in West Bengal, India. Had some good conversations around how best to structure the board, what do you need in terms of trustees and their skills, etc. etc. I also cautioned about operating in India, its not a trivial exercise and India is scattered with wastelands of foreign charities who came to grief. For example, see here. Also see the original article on the Bill Gates imbroglio. If such a brilliantly managed and funded charity can come to grief, then smaller ones are far too easily screwed up.

The response to us asking for more women trustees for IT4CH has been fantabulous, we now have 3 absolutely brilliant ladies who are interested in helping out with exciting projects. Cant wait till the trustee meeting on the 9th of November to introduce them to the rest of the gang and take this forward.

We also met with somebody from my old alma mater, Manchester Business School and figured out some good ways to take the alumni bit ahead with the firm.

Much to do, so little time…

Request for more trustees

2011-10-22T01:02:00.001-07:00

I met with an amazing lady, Maggie Berry, who runs this outfit, Women in Technology. They try to get more women into technology and Finance and believe you me, we need more women. Its just full of boring old gits. When you keep on seeing ugly ass iggiots like me, you wonder. Anyway, spoke to her and she popped up this lovely note in her newsletter. Already had two responses and both of them are brilliant.

15. Could you be a trustee for the charity Information Technology for Children's Hospitals?
Information Technology for Children's Hospitals, IT4CH, is a 14 year old IT charity which provides technology to long term and terminally ill children in hospital. They take equipment from firms, refurbish them while training young adults (who are challenged due to drugs, domestic violence, psych problems, etc.) and give them a skill and then deploy the computer equipment to hospital schools and kids who are stuck at home. They also provide laptops for hospital teachers who are then better able to go about training bed or house ridden children. Over the past 14 years, they have contributed thousands and thousands of PCs, laptops and other IT equipment to children in more than 250 hospitals here in the UK. They are the only charity in the UK which is involved in this area. It's a fairly small charity - they have a CEO, lots of volunteers (fund-raising mainly) and a turnover of c£100,000 each year. They are now looking to improve and change direction. Rather than just give PCs and laptops to the kids they would like to see if they can extend their role and assist people undertaking research in educational technology assisting sick kids, better communications, perhaps some scholarship to research students etc. As such they would like to expand the board of trustees (currently five members) to include senior technologists who are willing to help the charity with their technology vision, assist in fund raising and thus deploy technology to really help long term sick and terminally ill children in the UK. If any senior technologists in our network would be interested in finding out more, please contact Bhaskar Dasgupta, Programme Director, GTB PCM Sales Transformation Programme at HSBC - 020 7991 0691 or 07545 236 207 or bhaskar.dasgupta@hsbc.com. He would be very happy to have a chat/coffee with you. Alternatively if anyone has any old computer equipment, especially laptops, that they are willing to donate to the charity or if you're willing to sponsor the charity in their Christmas card appeal, please get in touch too. More information about IT4CH can be found here

A New Charity–RISE

2011-10-14T23:20:00.001-07:00

RISE is Rural India Schools Enterprise. I popped in for a session which explained what the charity does. I was simply gobsmacked, this lady has done some amazing stuff, improving literacy at a school in West Bengal, running some excellent social enterprise schemes in schools in the UK and and and. They now need a proper governing board of trustees to provide them with some guidance on strategy and make it sustainable. Good stuff. They also need to create a charity in India and do some more boring old stuff. So I will sit down with them to see what I can do to assist as a trustee. I think with the 100books project, and DISHA and other contacts that I can beg, borrow, steal from India, this can be a good dual country effort. I also think that using technology to spread the word, we can have a bigger impact. And I can also see few crossovers with the other charities..Quite excited about all this…

Very good team that the RISE team have, very impressed.

VC, Trustees, money worries, inspiration and education

2011-10-07T23:47:00.001-07:00

Boyo, this has been a rather busy time. Lets see

The video conferencing pilot at IT4CH at a hospital is going to start soon. The idea is that we will provide laptops with webcams attached to long term ill kids at home, a VC company will provide the little VC suite in the hospital school and thus the teacher can teach a much bigger pool of children around the catchment area. Neat, eh?
We will also extend this idea to the WCIT school. We will buy the integrated webcams for them.
We are interviewing for trustees at IT4CH, we already have 5 male trustees, but I think having more women trustees is good for diversity and different perspectives. So I met up with this lady, Maggie Berry, who is the CEO of Women in Technology. Brilliant stuff they do, I hope to help them out a bit more. We need more women in technology and in banking definitely. Anyway, the appeal will go out in their newsletter soon and in the meantime, she gave me an intro. I met with an amazing lady, she might join us at IT4CH as a trustee. I really liked her, her background and her technology experience. Very chuffed.
Met up with our MP, Minister and Patron of the HSH charity. He was quite encouraging and promised us help. He also wants to setup something so that local charities and local businesses can cluster and meet. Something like a Business/Social exchange. Hopefully something will come up from there.
Went to talk to new members of LSE SIFE, i am always impressed with what they get up to. Very very humbled and very happy about these kids who are so willing to do something for society, raise money and be good solid value generators. And yes, they are capitalists, in all the good sense of the world. I am going to help them along much more as much as possible.
Had a whole bunch of fresh MBA students from Essex down at the shop, we had a good discussion on sustainability. Its amazing how many students are interested in sustainability, eco-stuff, etc. Got couple of MD’s in as well to speak to them. They loved it. Also had a meeting with the advisory board.

Welsh Education–some thoughts

2011-10-01T01:03:00.001-07:00

As you know, I am closely associated with Swansea University Business School for many years now, am on their advisory board and am a visiting professor there. As a matter of fact I will be going over there again in November to deliver a lecture to the post graduate MBA students. Most probably I will talk about what do you do in your first 100 days of a job. But I digress.

Let me get the initial thoughts out of the way. I think Welsh education is in serious crisis. What it does, what its designed to do and what it feeds back to society, I am not sure that it is working well. Wales to me seem to reduced to some advertisements on BA flights, far too many photographs of puking mewling unconscious drunk young people on the streets of Swansea and Cardiff, heavy unemployment, and generally bad figures all around. But do not take my word for it, see what the Welsh Education Minister Leighton Andrews has to say on this matter. I quote:

"I will be blunt and I will be candid. In the first six months I have been in this post, I have begun to wonder whether the Higher Education sector in Wales actually wants the Assembly Government to have a higher education strategy, or whether it even believes that there is such a thing as a Welsh higher education sector ..."
"Indeed, I am not clear - eleven years after the National Assembly was created, and thirteen years after our historic referendum vote - that the higher education sector in Wales welcomes devolution or democratic accountability at all. Since our education agenda in Wales is based on the principle of democratisation, that is problematic."
"We have had more higher education institutions per head in Wales than any other part of the UK but have failed to break free from the bottom end of the UK growth and prosperity table. Our HE institutions are small compared with those just over the border. For all the achievements of higher education institutions, they have had only a very limited transformative impact on our economy, and on our global presence and reputation · We are not having a high enough impact in terms of the quality and quantity of our research · For too many in Wales, higher education remains a distant, and irrelevant activity, clouded in mystery.
"If we are to make the changes needed; we also have to be willing to question what may not be needed. We do not want governing bodies that act simply as a bunch of cheer-leaders for university management.
"I was interested to learn recently that some members of university governing bodies have been appointed on the basis of a phone call. Who you know not what you know. It appears that HE governance in post devolution Wales has become the last resting place of the crachach".

For me, a university governing body or advisory board is like the board of directors. They are the trustees for society to ensure that the university sector develops and delivers. If the universities and schools havent delivered, what does that say about the great and good of Wales? (the crachach)?

Did you know that 52% of the funding goes to administration and support services in the Higher Education Sector based upon a PwC Report? Chemistry and Modern languages departments are closing down. Also guess what? Most of the research being done in the universities is public sector research funded by the public sector. I am simply gobsmacked. Where is the value add? Where are the people who create jobs and scientific discoveries and innovation and and and? Where is the research to support that? Where are the students who are taught to be entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists?

I try to do what I can. In my lectures, I bang on about the students going and setting up their own units. Investing their own monies. Teach them about sales. How to generate more revenue. Bang on in these pages about it. And so on and so forth, but if we have to do more, we need people to realise that there is a crisis. I dont think people have realised it at all. And because they havent realised it, the funding is going to start getting cut. At end of the day, this entire convoy of public sector oriented very inefficient and ineffective education is being paid for by the taxpayer. And they are starting to revolt. By that time, we will have ended up with a group of highly useless drunk people who are lying around the streets of Cardiff and Swansea. Like now.

Looking for volunteers and Trustees

2011-09-24T00:02:00.001-07:00

As you know, we are always on the lookout for volunteers and trustees at the charity which provides technology to children in hospital. The power of networks…I was speaking to a friend and colleague at work, asking if she knew anybody who could help. She put me in touch with one additional person who is a senior technologist but at the same time, to another lady who is a senior COO. So met her and she further put me in touch with a lady who runs a group called as women technologists in the city. Wrote this email to them.

Hi XX
Thank you for taking the time to hear me out and thanks, YY, for the intro.

Here's the blurb as you requested.

I am the chairman of trustees of a 14 year old IT charity, IT4CH, which provides technology to long term and terminally children in hospital. What we do is to take equipment from firms like HSBC (we in HSBC provide 1000 units per year to this charity), refurbish them while training young adults (who are challenged due to drugs, domestic violence, psych problems, etc.) and give them a skill, and then deploy them to hospital schools and kids who are stuck at home. These young adults go forward and do jobs with pc repair or pc sales and we have got some very good feedback and results from this scheme. We also provide laptops for hospital teachers who are then better able to go about training bed / house ridden children. We have negotiated with Microsoft who provide us with all their software for £5/unit. HP provide us with equipment at half price, etc. Over the past 14 years, we have contributed thousands and thousands of PC's, laptops and other IT equipment to children in more than 250 hospitals here in the UK. We are the only charity here in the UK which is involved in this area and therefore we get referrals usually from hospital school teachers.

Here is the website. http://www.it4ch.com

Its a fairly small charity, we have one CEO, lots of volunteers (fund-raising mainly) and we have a turnover of average £100k. But we are now looking to improve and change direction. Rather than just give PC's and Laptops to the kids (dont get me wrong, its good), would like to see if we can extend our role and assist people undertaking research in educational technology assisting sick kids, better communications, perhaps some scholarship to research students, etc. etc. Here this email to you. We would like to expand the board of trustees (currently 4 members) to include senior technologists who are willing to help the charity with their technology vision, assist in fund raising and thus deploy technology to really help these long term sick and terminally ill children here in the UK. I understand you are connected with the Technologists in the City and if this can be forwarded on to them, I would really appreciate it.

These long term sick and terminally ill children in hospital usually dont have the bright sparkling eyes that one sees in children on the street, home and at school. They are in pain, they are in a hospital and they know "something" is "wrong" with them. But the worst thing is, they are not in touch with their friends, they are unable to talk, explore on the net and have the friends connectivity on social networking sites. They have grown up with technology. No mobile phones in the ward either. So one of the best moment's of my life is when we land up and give them a laptop or show a fully equipped school room with excellent PC's, their eyes light up. That moment is worth all of the volunteer time, money and energy that we put in.

If we can find any kind souls (Senior Technologists) who might be interested in becoming a trustee, I would be very happy to have a chat/coffee with them. If not a trustee, if anybody has old equipment that they are willing to donate to the charity or are willing to sponsor the charity in their Christmas card appeal, very happy to discuss that as well. Happy to provide more information if required.

Have a great weekend.

Looks like we have a winner here, we might get couple of new trustees and we might get some volunteers based upon what the lady from Women Technologists in the City. Who knows? This might help draw more women into the city and technology sectors

Quite chuffed indeed.

More progress at SIFE

2011-09-16T22:56:00.001-07:00

The chaps at LSE SIFE are quite ambitious, I love that. This trading game project is really catching fire. They went and sold it to a Malaysian University SIFE unit and they are spreading the word there. More about that later as my hopes to help them in Malaysia needs a bit of digging first.

Second, am going to go speak to the new SIFE recruits and get them all excited motivated. Plus if things work out, I will run investment classes for the volunteers. Teach these undergraduate students how to invest. I wonder if I can replicate what I did with Kannu with them?

Third, there seems to be very good progress with the Transformation Trust and extending the trading game to other schools in London. Watch this space.

The lady who introduced me to the Transformation Trust, Annie Natarajan, has managed to rope me into another initiative. lol, as a member of their advisory board. That’s also quite exciting, to help schools across the world to share best practises. I just got involved briefly in the initial proposals and Annie tells me that we have already got the first donation. Well done. The pilot will be touching some schools in India, Kenya and Brazil. Cant wait to get motoring on that.

Fourth, SIFE Nottingham is working on a pilot project with IT4CH with Pat. They are also pretty aggressive, they are trying to work to getting more donations of computers into our storage offices which we can then sell to get funds to purchase equipment for hospital schools and poor sick children at home.

Fifth, SIFE Nottingham has decided to do a project in Sri Lanka. Here’s the blurb on the email that they sent:

A group of 13 SIFE Nottingham students returned from Sri Lanka 4 weeks ago. To summarise our project, Future for Jaffna is a charitable organisation established under a trust deed. We aim to empower widows of the civil war in North Sri Lanka to create their own businesses, ranging from food processing to sewing and tailoring businesses. The ultimate aim is to establish a community and entrepreneurial/business centre in Jaffna, where the widows can sell their products, and where people can receive help in setting up their own business. Finally, we are looking into an environmental sub-project, mobilising rural communities through the production of biofuels.
We are partnering with a local charity, CORD Sri Lanka who monitor livelihood projects with widows. Their widows receive funding via a rigid scheme from the Bank of Ceylon; we do have more specific details on this scheme.
We require funding for the business start-ups for Future for Jaffna to be successful. This may be via a local bank, offering an independent finance scheme, or through raising funds through sponsorship and donations, and setting up a microfinance scheme. A key objective for us is to raise £5,000, at which point we will meet the £5,000 income requirement for registration by the Charity Commission, opening the floodgates to funding opportunities.

So I have got them hooked up with some of my colleagues in Sri Lanka. I think this should be a good thing to help push forward. Still under discussion on how exactly the firm can help them but broadly, i think we could provide advisory services to these poor ladies. I didn't know we were the only international firm operating there. Good stuff, makes me proud to work for such a nice firm.

I love September, after the hiatus of the Summer, its good to get back in track.

More computers at Arrowe Park Hospital

2011-09-10T03:07:00.001-07:00

The IT4CH charity got some computers into the Hospital School at Arrowe Park Hospital.

One of our trustees, Marc Hayes-Green, bravely decided to do something extremely physical and raised a shed load of money. Marc and his friends cycled to Paris. They are mad, lol, but very nice. That money was used to purchase the office furniture and all these lovely machines for the long term and terminally ill children in this hospital. Well done, Marc, excellent work there.

A story of a young girl

2011-09-03T00:27:00.001-07:00

This is a story of a young girl that our CEO of IT4CH helped with giving a home PC, I have suitably anonymised it but bloody hell….How can people be so cruel to their own people and how can social services be so bloody difficult? Pisses me off no end. But still, look at it, the same society helped this young girl to get up and go. Brave brave girl

When I was still living in Surrey, I had a call from XX Hospital about a family in dire need of help. The couple’s son had died, leaving a drug-addict wife and two young girls who were living in a squat in London. The grandparents were desperately trying to obtain a Court Order to take the children into their care. A doctor had examined the girls and found heavy amounts of drugs in their system because the mother was drugging them to make them sleep during the night so she could go out looking for drugs. Another problem was that because the girls were so heavily drugged, one of them had been near a heater throughout the night and had bad burns on her back – she was too heavily drugged to know what was happening. She was facing years of skin-graft operations.

I went to see the grandparents in XX but I wasn’t sure what I could do. They lived in a small house in XX which was immaculate. The grandfather drove a lorry for X and was desperate to have his grandchildren with them. I spoke to neighbours and many other people who knew them. I went with them to the first Court appearance, identified myself, and told him about the drugs, the burns, and the heart condition which had also been discovered in the younger of the girls. I told the judge I had spoken to the X Hospital about getting the 10 year-old on the list for surgery, and they had suggested a referral as soon as possible. I gave the judge a written statement of what I had discovered from neighbours and suggested he should also listen to the people from XX Hospital whose staffs were now caring for the girls who were still having intravenous anti-viral drugs to clear their system. It took weeks of Court visits, with all sorts of talking heads saying the grandparents were too old. I asked to go back into the witness-box and made an angry statement: “You have three choices: return them to their mother, put them in care for the remainder of their teenage life, or hand them over to their loving grandparents.” I went on to tell him that the interference of do-gooders who were stopping children being looked after by adoptive parents, or in this case loving grandparents, were condemning children to a life without family life or love. They were handed over to the grandparents and we worked hard to get the adoption pushed through, done pro bono by a lawyer friend of mine. I put a PC into the home ready for when they arrived home.

Why am I telling you this? Well, the older girl has completed her fifth skin graft surgery and is a beautiful 19 year-old who is preparing to go to College. They are having a big celebration and I would like to send her a £20 voucher from us. I know it’s not in the charity’s mandate, but I saw both these girls through hospital treatment: one having the terrible surgeries which replaced the skin on the whole of her back, and the other having three lots of heart surgery. Capital One’s Christmas Appeal gave them toys and food each Christmas until they both reached 16, (which was done through X, who lived near me, and help from X through his contacts). I wrote to X about it. Having gone through 87 skin grafts, he knew the pain she would have to go through. He wrote a wonderful letter to her to give his support and visited the ward when he was in London. The added problem was that her dirty clothes had burned themselves into her skin and she was in danger of dying from septicaemia. It took a year to clear away the debris burnt into her skin.

Needless to say, the trustees were all supportive of her action.

Some case studies from Home Start

2011-08-13T00:28:00.001-07:00

Here are some case studies of the people we helped.

1. A HEALTH VISITOR’S REFERRAL

Jo’s health visitor made a referral to Home-Start Hillingdon because Jo was suffering from post natal depression after the birth of her daughter 1 month ago. Jo and her husband had 4 other children aged 2, 3, 8 and 17 years and were living in very overcrowded 2-bedroomed accommodation. An accident six months previously had left her with an injury which made walking difficult and for which she was still receiving physiotherapy. She was also caring for her elderly mother who was in poor health.
The referrer asked for both emotional and practical support from a volunteer.
How the volunteer helped

During the co-ordinator’s initial visit, Jo talked about the stresses in her life and became tearful. She badly needed a ‘listening ear’ as she was very isolated. She had been offered anti-depressant medication but had refused this as she ‘didn’t want to admit that something was wrong’. Jo was also having difficulties with the 3 year old, who was very clingy, and the 8 year old, who was having problems at school.
Sue began visiting Jo and her focus was to offer emotional support and ‘an extra pair of hands’. Sue’s visits had a calming influence on the situation and gradually she was able to support Jo through the range of difficulties the family was experiencing. The next 18 months was a roller-coaster of events but Sue’s warmth and commitment to the family were a source of comfort and reassurance to the family.
Sue’s support continued for 18 months, towards the end of which the family were re-housed into accommodation which met their needs. It was planned to end the volunteer’s visits shortly after the move but then Jo’s mother died and Sue continued to visit for another 2 months while Jo came to terms with her loss.

The mother’s feedback

On the feedback form, after the visits had ended, Jo wrote:
Sue was a wonderful friend to me and the kids loved her to bits. She was always helpful and even picked them up for school for me. She was always kind and loved to play with the kids. I know she was always busy but she never made a rush for the door. If I was up to my eyeballs with things she would just roll her sleeves up and do all she could to help me. She has a very gentle nature and I miss her very much. The kids still talk about her and wonder how she is.
Home-Start is very lucky to have her. I just wish the world was full of people like Sue as it would be a much better place.
The health visitor’s feedback

The service made a fantastic difference to the family.

2. THE STORY OF A HEALTH VISITOR’S REFERRAL

Sarah suffered a brain hemorrhage 15 years ago which resulted in some loss of sight and ‘dysphasia’ - a condition which causes her to have difficulty with her verbal communication. She also has severe migraines and occasional fits.
The health visitor made a referral to Home-Start after the birth of Sarah’s 2^nd child which was delivered by Caesarian section. Sarah is unable to drive because of her medical condition and was finding it difficult to get out with a baby, Jon, and a boisterous toddler, Sam. In addition, her frustration at her limitations was causing her to feel stressed which, in turn, was increasing the number of migraines she was having. The referrer asked for both emotional and practical help from a volunteer.

How the volunteer helped
During the co-ordinator’s initial visit, Sarah confirmed what the health visitor had said and talked about her difficulty in coming to terms with the effects of her disability and the difficulties this caused her as a mother.
The volunteer, Vanessa, began her weekly visits to Sarah and the focus of support was identified in response to the areas of need identified with Sarah:
Feeling isolated- it was agreed that the volunteer would help TO reduce Sarah’s isolation by her weekly visits
Parent’s emotional health/well being - the volunteer to ‘lend a listening ear’ and to help build Sarah’s confidence by going out together
Parent’s physical health/well being - the volunteer to sometimes look after the children to allow Sarah to have a rest to help prevent stress-related migraines
Being involved in the children’s the volunteer to support Sarah in setting boundaries with Sam and supporting her with managing his toilet-training.
After 11 months, during the co-ordinator’s review visit, Sarah said that, although she would have liked Vanessa’s visits to continue forever, she felt that she was now managing and that another family probably needed the support more than she did.
It was agreed that visits would end but, as often happens in Home-Start, Sarah and Vanessa continue to see each other as friends.
The mother’s feedback
At the final review visit, Sarah said outings with Vanessa, including attending a parent and toddler group, had helped increase her confidence and that she now goes to yoga and singing classes. Vanessa had offered suggestions about managing Jon’s behaviour and Sarah intended speaking to her health visitor about parenting classes. Her migraines were also less frequent. Summing up how she had felt about the volunteer’s visits, she said:
‘When Vanessa arrived, I felt relaxed. I was like a weight was being lifted from me and I will always be grateful for her help.’.

3. THE STORY OF A REFERRAL

Julie and Derek were referred by their health visitor who felt that they were in need of support. The couple has two boys, William aged 4 and Dominic and 1 year. William had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and his behaviour was very challenging and could be aggressive towards his brother.
Julie was concerned that she was not spending enough quality time with Dominic due to William’s demands. The situation was putting the parents under enormous strain which had contributed to Julie feeling depressed and needing to take anti-depressants in addition to medication for a chronic physical illness.
In addition, both parents worked hours which allowed one of them to be a home at all times and this was contributing to their feelings of stress. Throughout this visit, Julie was tearful and clearly feeling at the end of her tether.

How the volunteer helped
During the co-ordinator’s initial visit, both parents said that it would be helpful if a volunteer could play with the children to give Julie a break or play with one of the boys to allow her to have individual time with the other child. It was also agreed that, once the volunteer and the children had got to know each other, she would sometimes look after the children to allow the parents time alone.
A volunteer, Jackie, was introduced to the family and began to visit once weekly. During her support to the family she developed a close relationship with each of them. William started school, which helped considerably, and Jackie then took Dominic out alone. During the school holidays Jackie took both children for outings to the park or MacDonald’s during which time William was sometimes very challenging but this did not phase her as her commitment to the family was unswerving.
After 14 months the co-ordinator and parents agreed that the situation had progressed to a point where the volunteer’s visits could end. Julie was sad for this to happen but acknowledged that she was coping better, to a point where she had stopped taking anti-depressants.
The parent’s feedback
Without a doubt Jackie is one of the nicest people we have ever met. We feel blessed to have had her as our friend for over a year and we hope it continues. The boys are extremely fond of her – she has been a rock for us. We were desperate for help and she came upon us like a guardian angel at just the right time.

She was so reliable and nothing was too much trouble for her. I (Julie) will never forget how she helped me through one horrible day with loads of calls, empathy and support. The way she dealt with William is amazing and she never took it personally when he was having a bad day and took it out on her. I guess she was really accepting of him which is what he needs.

She has brought sunshine and laughter into a house where they were missing for a while. We all love her and will miss her warm loveliness. Thank you so much Linda and Home-Start for restoring our faith in humankind.

4. THE STORY OF A SELF REFERRAL

Meena rang Home-Start shortly after the birth of her twins. She had previously been working full-time in London and therefore had few contacts locally. Her husband was supportive but worked long hours, leaving early and arriving home late in the evening. Meena’s mother had recently become seriously ill so the arrangement for her to come and stay and help after the births could no longer happen.
Although she was thrilled with her daughters, Meena was exhausted and feeling overwhelmed by their demands. She was full of doubts about her competence as a parent and daunted by the responsibility of looking after two babies. In addition to this, she was struggling to cope with her fears about her mother’s illness.

How the volunteer helped

Judy began visiting Meena and they developed a relationship in which Meena was able to voice her fears about her mother’s illness which alleviated some of her anxiety.
Initially Judy agreed to visit twice weekly and reassured and encouraged Meena in her ability to look after the girls. Meena’s confidence quickly increased to a point where she could trust her own judgement about their care. Gradually she was able to recognise that, although having twins would always be hard work, she was not only competent to look after them but that she was really enjoying it.
Meena had always intended to return to work part-time and it was agreed that Judy’s support would cease at this point.
The mother’s feedback

During the final co-ordinator’s visit, Meena said “I could talk to Judy about anything! It was so useful to speak to someone who was independent of my family – she was a good ‘sounding board’”
After the volunteer’s visits ended, Meena wrote a letter expressing her thoughts:
Dear Linda
Please may I thank you once again for the support I received…..The care and concern you showed for my family over the last 6 months was both very timely and so welcome. We all appreciate the hard work that volunteers such as Judy do and she was very well-matched to our family. We loved having her here and do hope that she will keep in touch.
May I take this opportunity to say what a valuable contribution Home-Start Hillingdon makes to the community.

5. FEEDBACK FROM FAMILIES

Small things we do, we help families and intervene where very low cost assistance can avoid heavy cost intervention and assistance later on. And these are some of the decent interventions, some others are truly hairy. Our brave volunteers are all amazing, the pain they go through. To the families they are calm, positive and unflappable but hey, they are doing this without any monetary recompense but think about having to deal with this stuff day in day out? I would be screaming and be a basket case.

I'm desperate to save my Home-Start – any millionaires out there?

2011-08-06T00:12:00.001-07:00

Somebody who is desperate to keep their Home Start Charity up. Same problems we are facing as well, lack of funding, but bloody hell, I am going to try my level best to ensure that this charity keeps on going.

As the staff team and I await, for the second time this year, our warning of redundancy letters, I have been desperately trying to compose a begging letter to any "secret millionaires" with a desire to help a small local Home-Start charity in dire straits.
When I worked in social care 18 years ago, one of my colleagues asked the question, "Why do we not have a Home-Start in Bromley?" Little did I know that six years later I would be setting one up and managing it. This marvellous project has been supporting local parents and children for 12 years. Funding has been a constant issue but somehow we managed to survive. But this time around the climate is very different.
Back in February I wrote a piece highlighting our initial funding plight, but I was too nervous to identify the project, fearful of jeopardising opportunities for future funding. At the eleventh hour, our local authority provided us with a six-month extended contract which ends in September. This gave us "wiggle room" to search for alternative funding streams. While continuing to run a vital support service to families with young children we have been diligently writing bids to trust funds all of which are now under pressure to make their funds go further. The most exhausting of these bids was for the Big Lottery, which could have saved us, but alas, we failed to hit the mark with its panel.
When speaking to various bods about our plight I have been confronted with pensive faces advising me to "think creatively" or "in these times you have to think outside the box". Give me strength – this is just another way of saying let's change something purely for the sake of changing it. In my world if something isn't broken, leave well alone. There is no need to jiggle it, tweak it or reshape it to suit some blue-sky thinking or to fit in with the latest trend that is deemed to be "of the moment". What we do has been shown to work successfully – my office is filled with thank you notes and cards from families who have benefited from the commitment of our dedicated volunteers.
It works perfectly well, so why are we having so much difficulty in finding the funding to do what we are good at and that we do better than anybody else? I don't want this project and team to turn into jack of all trades and master of none.
Anyway, needs must so the nearest I have come to thinking outside the box is by purchasing extra lottery tickets in anticipation of giving my winnings to charity, including Home-Start of course.
So what have I got to lose with a secret-millionaire-style letter? If this doesn't work then it appears the scheme will most likely close. Who will bridge the gap when a family needs help but does not meet the criteria for social care support? Where will families and children go once they have lost this vital early intervention service? Who has considered the potential savings on local authority budgets that will be lost as families difficulties escalate or put children at risk?
So I am discarding my previous anonymity and predict that unless someone comes to our aid very soon, Home-Start Bromley will be closed for good. I also have no doubt that in five or six years' time yet another over-worked health visitor or social worker will be repeating the question that I first heard 18 years before – "Why do we not have a Home-Start in this area?" – a question that will resonate from deep within the chasm unless a secret millionaire or some other miracle comes to our aid.

Read the comments, its frightening the level of animosity people have towards charities. Another news item came up in a similar vein:

In Hull, the eleventh most deprived region in the country, Caroline Watson says the Home Start charity she runs is "hanging on by its fingertips" after the council withdrew its £107,000 grant in March.
Her nine-person team was immediately shrunk by two and, after 25 years, the service will disappear entirely if no new cash arrives next March.
"We have kept some services running by applying to the Department of Health, and got some money for a project supporting children who have a parent in prison from Lloyds TSB's Foundation. But if by Christmas we don't get new money I will have to think about giving everybody redundancy [cheques]".
If that happens, 167 families with 406 children will be left without a service which, Watson said, many parents struggling to bring up children had come to rely on for school runs, doctor's trips and, in some cases, a shoulder to lean on.
Some in government argue that the "creative destruction" of public spending cuts will be good for charities by ensuring only the fittest and leanest survive. By winnowing out charities that became dependent on state funding and promoting others that have the scale and the flexibility to thrive in a new funding environment, so the thinking goes, the voluntary sector will emerge ready to take over public services. Watson says such thinking misses the point. Her service is already cost-effective, providing crucial support beyond the reach of the state at just £21 a week for each family. "We need money to run the police checks, manage volunteers, pay for an office and even put an ad in the local paper. Nothing comes for free. I cannot see how you could do it cheaper," says Watson.
A report published by trade union-backed False Economy on Tuesday, which shows the impact of local authority spending cuts, has laid bare some of the contradictions of government policy. Although ministers have spent months promoting the idea of volunteering, community groups and charities running public services, the message has been undermined by the extent of cuts to their funding.
Home Start has 330 local divisions, and says 40 of these are under threat because of the cuts. Almost 6,000 children will be affected. Branches in Bromley, south-east London, and Hampshire face closure this week. "It is the depth and the speed of the cuts which have made it so difficult to cope," said Vivien Waterfield, director of fundraising at Home Start.
There is renewed concern in the sector that the pruning of public spending will shrink the sector. Earlier this year the Charity Commission revealed that more than 8,000 charities have been removed from the official register since May 2010 – and only 6,400 new charities have been founded in their place. False Economy has identified cuts of more than £110m across charities in England as local authorities withdraw funding.
There has been a rush for charities to huddle together to weather the economic storm. The commission reported a 150% increase in the number of mergers it had to deal with.
Experts say many innovative schemes may be lost in the rush to make savings. Your Sanctuary, formerly Surrey Women's Aid, hit the headlines earlier this year for offering confidential helpline advice and one-to-one meetings to men who have been abused. One in six men suffer from domestic violence, according to the latest British Crime Survey figures.
Yet the charity's chief executive, Beverley Pass, said that it still ended up losing £38,000 last year, even though it picked up new funding. "My worry is that local councils are making these decisions on the basis of how they go down with local people. Some services are not politically popular and they are being cut."
Jack Dromey, Labour's shadow communities and local government minister, says the government has hit councils with "huge, front-loaded cuts … and the voluntary sector and community groups up and down the country are paying the price".
Yet some charities have managed to cling on. Hilary Pannick started her award-winning Straight Talking charity 13 years ago in her loft. Its innovative model aims to get single mothers and fathers back into work by paying them to educate their peers in school on the pleasures and perils of early parenting. She admits being "very angry last year" when councils cut £60,000 from her charity's budget – and she had to close services in the south-west.
"It seemed so short-sighted. For the first five years a teenage mother costs the taxpayer £100,000 and we were helping to cut that [bill]. We had to work twice as hard and made redundancies and got some money from the Department of Health. Basically we clung on by the skin of our teeth."
Pannick says that her concern is that the coalition is reshaping too much of government too quickly.
"We don't know where anything is or how to apply for grants. It's really very hard to navigate. The private sector can do it much more easily - and I worry we will lose out to them in the end."

But somebody asked, what kind of families do you look after? This is an example of a family that we look after. From here.

Dawn is a 6-year-old girl who lives in a condemned high-rise block on Mandela Avenue. Mandela Avenue is on The Swamp Estate on the edge of Ruraltown. Dawn has no friends because she wets herself when the children sit on the floor for reading time at the local primary school. As a large warm pool of urine slowly grows larger around Dawn, the other children move quickly away.
Her garish coloured chiffon dress is covered in ribbons and lucky charms. Faded by her mother’s constant hand-washing after Dawn’s accidents, the dress is slowly losing it’s appeal. A teacher always rushes over to Dawn, scoops her up and carries her away to the bathroom. If a male of any age touches Dawn, she screams uncontrollably for up to five minutes and cannot be stopped, even by her favourite female Teaching Assistant.
I was speaking to one of our courageous midwives this week. She is monitoring Dawn’s sixth and newest sibling; an emaciated and filthy four-month-old baby named Bobby-Ray Jr. She had asked Dawn’s mother why Dawn wets herself and screams when a man touches her. It is because her father ‘interferes with her’ when he bothers to turn up drunk to steal the child benefit money. Dawn’s grandmother, a woman in her early 40′s with seven children of her own has something to say about this. From a cloud of cigarette smoke over in the corner she asks what does the midwife expect? Dawn’s mother is not a good wife to him, ‘if you get my meaning like’.
She justifies the rape of her own granddaughter by her son-in-law by blaming her daughter for not having more sex with him. Even for Ruraltown this is a new low. This is Jeremy Kyle right here on the street.
I check with the Child Protection DS. She tells me that Dawn and every single one of her siblings have been designated as a ‘Child In Need’. Apparently this attracts some level of what she calls ‘intervention’ by social services and our own team. I ask if Dawn’s mother’s ‘partner’ has been nicked for sexual assault. Which one? she asks. ‘Which partner?’. She has more than one? ‘Yes, she has three’. Do they all rape Dawn? ‘No. Only two of them rape Dawn’. Are they banged up? ‘No. CPS dropped both cases’.
The Child Protection DS tells me that these two men are brothers. They enjoy some kind on ‘entitlement’ to Dawn’s mother and to Dawn and her sisters because of some ‘deal’ their father did with Dawn’s grandfather a few years ago over some land. This deal was broken by Dawn’s grandfather and to avoid a feud, Dawn’s mother was ‘promised’ to the brothers. Dawn’s mother then injected a level of confusion and damaged pride into the equation by producing two mixed-race children. This was some kind of insult to the family who own her, and she had to be re-housed at public expense on two occasions. No charges were ever brought against any person.
The DS looks tired and a little too thin for a woman of her age. She kind of ‘stares through me’ like so many of her colleagues who work the Swamp tend to do. At twenty six she looks like a woman twice her age. I ask her about Dawn’s future. She has no idea. She and her team are losing two-thirds of the officers on the unit under the budget cuts. Dawn and her family will be ‘managed’ by local uniformed police after August.
The DS applied for her own job under the new system but was ‘unsuccessful on this occasion’ and is going to be a custody sergeant at Ruraltown Central. She doesn’t mind, she has clearly had enough. I ask her how many Dawns there are on the Swamp, she tells me there are more than fifty families ‘engaged’ with social services under child protection measures for neglect or abuse on that estate alone.
We stand in silence for a few minutes. I want to give them both a bit of a squeeze but that would be unprofessional. Besides, the midwife is going out with Debbie for a few drinks next week, she would be bound to grass me up and I don’t want Debbie to think I’ve gone soft or anything.
I promise to look into the father’s criminal conviction history but I already know what I will find. Meanwhile Dawn is still wetting herself and screaming if any male of any age touches her. The suburban kids with biblical names in her class like to test this reaction every day or so.
This is my world as a policeman in Ruraltown. Not Champneys, phone hacking or senior officers and their ‘milestones’.
Gadget Note: Dawn’s father, and I use that term loosely, has nine convictions for burglary in the last four years and has never served a single day in adult detention. All cases of violence and abuse against family members have been dropped due to a lack of support by victims and witnesses. We don’t ‘police by consent’ on this estate. In 2004 he broke a Met policewoman’s jaw and received a suspended sentence.

Sometimes I feel like wishing capital punishment was back. Some people are beyond the pale. Some go rogue and need to be hunted down and eradicated. Paedophiles are top of the list.

It doesnt cost you a dime to attend Uni

2011-07-30T01:08:00.001-07:00

We were invited to a concert at the O2 by The Transformation Trust. Lets not talk about the music, ok? But first the pics

We had some speeches at the Sky Bar while I was taking pics.

I am trying out my hipsmatic iphone app. Weird pics, or what?

Anyway, then went to the seats.

There were 16000 kids in the hall.

On the left and on the right, its filling up.

Where we were sitting. Kannu and his friend went off backstage to see the acts. I couldnt even pronounce some of them, let alone know them

More people flooding in.

Then it starts.

A panorama.

Then Martin Lewis came on and talked about how important and easy it is to go to Uni. See here for his report. Its quite important. Basically he said the following points in his slide:

"YOU DON’T NEED CASH TO GO TO UNIVERSITY"

"EARN UNDER £21,000 AND NEVER REPAY"
"REPAYMENTS STOP AFTER 30 YEARS"
"YOU PAY BACK LESS, BUT FOR LONGER AND MORE"

"DONT BELIEVE THE HYPE!"

Very good, we need more information out there about education. I have now found a person inside the bank who can speak about this link with the transformation trust. So hopefully something will move on that. Very creditable of the Trust.

Thank you cards

2011-07-23T04:14:00.001-07:00

We got couple of cards from couple of Hospitals.

This is from St Mary’s Hospital Children’s Ward.

This one is from Whittington Hospital.

How nice of them to acknowledge the donations we give to these brave and wonderful kids.

Updates

2011-07-17T02:26:00.001-07:00

I realise that I haven't updated this blog for a long long time. So what’s been happening?

IT4CH

The IT4CH charity is trundling along fine. We are currently looking for a deputy to the CEO as well as some volunteers who can assist in getting more equipment into the warehouses that we have got scattered around the country. I think we found one person but she had to unfortunately duck out as she has to move away. Drats.

We met up with the head of SIFE in Nottingham and he has promised to work with us to see if we can improve the quality of computers we get, increase the number of donations we get, get some properties that we can store them in and also to see if we can enhance the training opportunities. Good start anyway. If this works out, then we can think about rolling this out nationally to other SIFE chapters who might be of assistance.

The Transformation Trust.

I met with Nicky Old, a very inspiring lady from The Transformation Trust. She got introduced to me via our mutual friend, Annie Natarajan. Nicky invited me earlier to the BT Tower where I took loads of pics. The Transformation Trust is doing a fantastic job with hundreds of schools around the country but they wanted to do something which can improve financial literacy amongst the schools. I immediately thought about seeing if we can use the Trading Game from LSE SIFE for this.

So anyway, that meeting happened between the Transformation Trust, LSE and SIFE and good steps were agreed. We have decided to check out the trading game to the London based schools that the Transformation Trust has links with. Then we can think about rolling this out. I fully expect that we will be able to touch 40-50 schools, which means about 2000 students at the minimum will be trained up on markets, how to trade, understand finance and economics, understand how to go to college and study, savings and investments. All in all, a very good step. Fairly chuffed with this step. If need be, i can help arrange for the presentations and discussions at work.

Home Start Hillingdon

We had a bit of a strategy session where a bit of head banging went on about how to do the funding over the next 3 years. Quite an interesting challenge we have here, to improve the position of the charity to cover for the funding gaps which have arisen due to the reduction of public sector funding. So I have been trying to get hold of various bits and bobs, like getting a friend of mine to agree to sponsor a web shop, need to figure out a way to get some funding to train our families / volunteers to create stuff so that we can sell, get some more sponsorship monies from people who might be willing to run / bike to raise some dosh. Got a whole list of tertiary items in track. So lets see how that works out. Its a long way to go and the funding cuts dont help at all.

Universities.

Had a nice session with the MBS chaps who popped over to work and i arranged to have 4 other MBS alumni who work in the bank to speak to a bunch of new chaps. Also got one of our MD’s to speak to them about life in general, she was brilliant, people loved her. We were also going to have another session with mentors and mentees but that fell through unfortunately. Oh! well.

I don't know if I talked about this or not but popped up to Colchester to talk about transformation to a bunch of public sector and SME owners. Am also going to do an introduction to their new MBA entries at the bank and also another talk in September to Essex alumni.

Mentees.

Couple of the mentees are trundling along. One lady got a new job, its not as good, but its a job, so now she can carry on the search for a new one. Another lady wants to get a better job so will introduce her to couple of my contacts in the information security world. I got some good contacts out of a dinner I attended at a CIO forum recently on identify and access control. So things are moving on.

The Old Martonians do the Caledonian Challenge

2011-05-17T13:37:00.001-07:00

One of my colleagues is doing his bit for charity and doing a stonkingly amazing thing, 54 miles in 24 hours. 2 full marathons. over some very rugged grounds. Bloody hell. Anyway, do see if you can support them if possible. Dont mind Tommo’s bearded and capped visage, he is actually a pretty decent bloke.

Here’s the link.

Some angels for the charity

2011-04-29T14:07:00.001-07:00

These are three of the sponsors who ran the London Marathon and raised some desperately needed funds for the charity. You can see Floyd on the running vests.

Here is a blogpost from one of the runners. Excellent Stuff. THANK YOU!

Nudity for Charity

2011-04-29T00:56:00.001-07:00

I have been researching on how to raise funds with photography, sort of killing 2 birds with one stone. And guess what I bumped across? This site. (Warning, NSFW)

Not sure if anybody will pay to watch me nude now, would they? (answers on a very small postcard)

Worries and troubles galore

2011-04-23T23:47:00.001-07:00

I am racking my brains on how to raise more money for Home Start. Sustainable money, not something that we are taking off the public purse. I will be approaching the firm to see if some kind of regular funding can be arranged, but something more sustainable has to be established. I have also volunteered to be the photographer for various events where we can raise some dosh. Perhaps a calendar? lol, that should be interesting, but if we are not able to raise some serious thousands of pounds by end of the year, we will be in trouble.

On the other hand, as I had mentioned before. HSBC donated 1000 pieces of kit to the IT4CH charity. That put us in a tizzy. Usually we get smaller quantities of kit so we can turn it around in time and dispatch to various hospitals, but this is really nice of them. We can give some good surprises to quite a lot of hospitals around the country. But we have found some space and its now well settled down.

Incidentally, I finally managed to find the link to the competition submission that I had done for the Whittington Hospital. Here’s the link to the competition website. I like the idea, it links photography with philanthropy. Maybe I can do something like this for Home Start.

Other news, doing a fair bit of mentoring with some students and also trying to get some alumni work going with an old alma mater. God, its painful, like pushing jelly uphill. But we shall overcome and all that nice guff. I also went to Swansea Business School for an advisory board meeting. I will write more about some points which popped up there about the future of business education, but will blog it on my dailysalty site, not here, don't want to bore you guys.

I am also thinking about resigning from WCIT. I am not really sure that I am adding any value there, all the events take place during day time in the city and I just cannot get there.

Running their heart out for charity. Thank you!

2011-04-15T23:25:00.001-07:00

IT for children in Hospital is a great little charity. It isn't a big hairy TV advertising charity, it doesn't do sponsored moon walks or have film stars adopting children in its name. What it has a great CEO, Pat Ryan, and a bunch of volunteers who raise money for providing IT to children in hospital. Simple thing. And we don't rely on the public sector. And we are fairly sustainable. And we have fun. And I am proud of the little that it does.

Dan Leonard is an ex-colleague of mine who is an absolutely brilliant social networking guru. He has fixed and enhanced the website. Go take a look at it. We now have a feed from the Facebook IT4CH page.

We have also got a team from Huddle running the Marathon for us. Here’s their blog post talking about it. Bless their running vests and running shoes. Great bunch of very passionate supporters. BTW, if you wanted to donate to the charity, here’s the link.

How do you like the mascot? His name is Floyd

Sir David Jason will be broadcasting a BBC Radio 4 appeal for Home-Start

2011-04-14T22:49:00.001-07:00

We are delighted that Sir David Jason will be broadcasting a BBC Radio 4 appeal for Home-Start in May. We are one of the 52 charities that have made it through the BBC’s rigorous selection process for an appeal in 2011.
The first broadcast of Home-Start’s appeal will be on:
Sunday May 8th at 7.55am and repeated at 9.26pm and again on Thursday 12th May at 3.27pm.
BBC Radio 4, 92.4 – 94.6FM, or LW 198, or listen live/listen again on the Radio 4 website.
David will talk about how Home-Start supports a grandfather who has taken on full care of his three young granddaughters because of his daughter’s drug and alcohol problems.
Almost two million people listen to the BBC Radio 4 appeals and we are hoping to raise much needed funds for our work in supporting families. The funds raised will be shared between Home-Start UK and local Home-Starts across the country and will benefit children and families in need.
We work with families who, for whatever reason, aren’t getting the help they need. Very often we’re the last chance they have.
Listen to our appeal and pass this on to spread the word.

SIFE LSE- National Competitions

2011-04-14T11:16:00.001-07:00

I got this news from the team today. Very good stuff. Best of luck to the chaps.

On behalf of Myles, I am delighted to announce that the LSE SIFE team have made it through to the semi-finals of the National Competition!!
The next stage, the semi-finals, will be held in the morning and the finals will be in the afternoon – for those of you who are unaware, the winning team of the National Competition will represent the UK in the Global Competition in Kuala Lumpur later this year.
I’m sure all BAs will join me in congratulating the team for getting this far and wish you all the best for tomorrow – we’re behind you 100%!

This week’s update

2011-04-09T09:50:00.001-07:00

Bit of a mixed bag this week. While one of the charities is going through some serious funding issues, that means that I as the interim treasurer is having to pour over financials and making the usual mess of it. Its so important in this day and age to make sure that your funding and your expenses are matched, otherwise we end up in severe trouble and then the basic existence of the charity itself is threatened. Specially the fact that your funding is very lumpy and not so certain while your outflow is smooth and very certain. The basic difference between your fixed and variable costs. Not good. The more I learn about this and the fascinating links with the public funding the more astonished I am.

On the SIFE front, went to hear the LSE team present to the business advisors. They did a fantastic job, I was so proud of what they have achieved, very professional and slick. I like!. My boys and girls, very nice. I do think they will do brilliantly at the national competition. We also need to print off their Annual Report. Will try to get a copy online.

On the IT4CH front, got the 1000 PC units from the bank, now the challenge is where to put them all, usually we get them in dribs and drabs, but now we got the full lot. So we need to worry about it a bit, but Pat is on the case.

This time when I am in India, I will try to pop into Disha to see how they are getting along. Long time no talk to them. I wonder how they are getting along. Ma and Baba are not getting a bit old to go check them out so have to go there myself.

Challenges galore with funding

2011-04-03T02:53:00.001-07:00

As you might know, I have recently joined Home Start as a trustee and was asked to help out temporarily as a treasurer as well. This organisation with its local chapters helps out families in trouble, whether drugs, lack of jobs, immigration problems, domestic violence, mental disability, you name it. So the charity trains volunteers to go to these families and speaks to them. Helps to put in a plan to remediate the issue, whether getting a job or to get medical assistance or simply escape domestic violence.

Anyway, the entire Home Start organisation is in trouble. This is pretty much almost fully funded by the government, the central government and local council. And the charities, with their fairly high fixed costs, is really susceptible to funding cuts or even delays.

Here’s a good article on a similar charity (SureStart) and how the funding changes are impacting this charity. Quoting large chunks of it.

Daycare Trust research suggests up to 86% of centres are facing budget cuts and that up to 250 may close in 2011. But ministers say there is enough money in the system to retain the centres. They want to refocus the centres to help more disadvantaged families with health visitors picking up some of their early intervention work.Sure Start Children's Centres are being cut in some places because the grant which funds them was cut by 11% in the emergency budget, and again in the comprehensive spending review by almost the same percentage.
Then the government removed the protection from the Sure Start budget. This has left them vulnerable as councils sought to make up losses to their central government grants overall. As local authorities have set out their plans to reduce budgets local campaigns have sprung up from parents anxious about losing the services and help they offer to them and their children.

One of the reasons why I have joined is that I am firmly of the belief that we can switch this idea of funding for families in our neighbourhood from sucking on the government’s tit to getting money from local businesses and other families. We need to make things more efficient and make this sustainable. I am going to speak to the ex treasurer of another charity which has gone bankrupt to find out why they did so. Well, we know why they went bust, they ran out of money from the government and were not able to replace it with private or alternative funding.

by the way, if you know of anybody who wishes to be a trustee and lives in and around Harrow, Ruislip, Hillingdon, and has experience of managing organisations or public sector units, happy to hear from them. In particular, very happy to hear from people who have HR experience of any sort.

===============

In other news:

1. Sustainability news, I am working to introduce a system of getting some actual revenue raising ideas on the table from our chaps. Sustainable cost savings is all right and good but the real challenge is to find something that raises revenues. Now THAT is a good challenge for me : )

2. On the IT4CH front, we are getting more properties across the country to store IT equipment and we are looking to find a deputy for Pat, we need some assistance on a part time basis. I spoke at couple of dinners to raise money for the charity. The first one was on cloud computing and the second was on asset management. Just shows that people are willing to pay me for the nothing that I know about and just regurgitate, lol.

3. We are moving ahead on the books for schools idea in India, still in the formative stage, but the bank has a relationship with a local school where we are contributing some stuff. So introduced couple of people together and seems like its working, we might have a bit of a movement on it.

4. On the academic front, am hoping to engage couple of MBA students and get them working on couple of projects, they get a business project and we get some high quality research out of them

5. Also meeting another university’s academic business coordinator to see what we can do to improve the liaison between the firm and the university.

6. Am hoping to join a corporate sustainability organisation, i need to understand more about this malarkey. Lets see.

7. I am going to go next week to the LSE SIFE unit’s presentations on the national competitions, I hope they win, they are my boys and girls :)

Baking brownies for Red Nose Day

2011-03-17T14:29:00.001-07:00

So tomorrow is Red Nose day. When people do silly things for raising money for charity. Diya is going to be dressing up in funky clothes, while her Baba is baking brownies at bloody 2136hours on a Thursday night for sale to other people at 50p a piece.

I didn't even know about this, had forgotten completely, and then the office girls attacked me. I was told, note, I was TOLD, that I will be providing something baked for a cake sale tomorrow. Dammit, if this was indeed going to be the case, then I might as well as remained in the damn navy where you are ordered, “you are volunteering”. Ok, enough whining. So 2 large baking tins full of brownies are currently baking. But I am not going to have even one. I tell you, its a promise. Seriously. Ma ki Kasam. Tetua daba kar. Swear it on the life of my TV remote. And iPhone.

sighs, who am I kidding?

anyway, its for a good cause, right?

Teach First

2011-03-02T21:01:00.001-08:00

Well, I have been working with SIFE LSE to get them working with the teachers in the teach first organisation. The concept behind teach first is to take 500-600 absolutely brilliant teachers per year, give them individual coaches, give them a good grounding and then deploy them to the most challenging and difficult secondary schools in the country. The SIFE team is working to get the trading game into the schools via this channel.

But besides this, I thought that I should get a bit involved as well, so have put in a bid to be a coach for one of the teachers. Lets see how that works out. I am quite excited about this opportunity to work closely with these Brits who will teach for England. Now that’s the kind of passion and commitment that is rare in this world and if I can help in some little way, so be it.

Home Start–the voyage begins

2011-02-13T00:55:00.001-08:00

So as i had said before, I looked around to check out where else I can assist now that the PhD is completed. On the Do-It website, found that they were looking for trustees so I applied, got to speak to the Home Start scheme manager, and then filled out a clutch of forms and finally got to meet the chairperson of trustees and the scheme manager.

I was disgracefully late, the place is just 10 miles away from me and I totally underestimated the traffic, landed about 8 minutes late. It was in a church and met the ladies. Quite an interesting setup, this unit provides assistance to families with children under 5 years of age and helps people who have mental health problems, unemployment problems, domestic violence, etc. Volunteers are trained, CRB checked and then associated with a family. Then they create and agree a goal for 3 months and try to achieve it.

The unit is primarily funded via government grants and there are cutbacks on the horizon with the deficit reduction plans of the government. I actually think this is good. This is purely community service and we should be able to do things that can assist in local and national fund raising that can assist in making sure that we have a sustainable business model. Relying on getting funding from local authorities or central government is not a sustainable business model, it will shrink and go away. There are also some financial tricks and tips that I have which hopefully I can bring to the table with assisting in fund raising.

So have been invited to attend a board meeting next week, lets see how that turns out.

Teach children how to manage finances

2011-01-30T15:20:00.001-08:00

This article made me a bit upset. We are trying, via the SIFE trading game, to get more students up to speed on their financial situation, learn about how to handle savings, manage expenses, so on and so forth. Why on earth do we not teach our kids how to manage their finances? This is ridiculous. I quote:

The case for this is really strong. A paper out by the Financial Services Authority today says that most consumers don’t understand basic financial terms. They don’t know what compound interest is, and they can’t work out whether the loan rate on the credit card is a good deal or not. They don’t know enough about bonus rates on savings products, so they frequently stay with their bank long after the savings rate it offered stopped being competitive. They don’t understand risk and reward in investment, so they are surprised when their fund, cosily named ‘Cautious’, falls 40 per cent in value.

We should be doing more to teach our kids how to manage their money so that they dont have bad financial histories and have to rely on the state because they cant be financially independent. The education secretary should really rethink this.

Updates to the charitable activities

2011-01-15T00:20:00.001-08:00

Well, I took the plunge and offered up my services as a trustee to a another local charity. Its called as Home Start. This is what they do.

We help to increase the confidence and independence of families by:

Visiting families in their own homes to offer support, friendship and practical assistance
Reassuring parents that their childcare problems are not unusual or unique
Encouraging parents' strengths and emotional well-being for the ultimate benefit of their children
Trying to get the fun back into family life

Our volunteers, who have parenting experience themselves, can offer:

Precious time for listening and talking
Help with the children
A break for parents
Practical help and reassurance
A chance to meet other parents in similar situations
Support to use local services and resources

Parents ask for Home-Start's help for all sorts of reasons:

They may feel isolated in their community, have no family nearby and be struggling to make friends
They may be finding it hard to cope because of their own or a child's physical or mental illness
They may have been hit hard by the death of a loved one
They may be really struggling the with emotional and physical demands of having twins or triplets - perhaps born into an already large family

Not sure how much I can do as a volunteer although that will definitely be helpful. There are many immigrant families here in Harrow and if I can help. But I think as a trustee, I can bring on some force multipliers in terms of communications, fund raising, technology and and and. Lets see, will be invited soon for an interview soon

I have fulminated before how charities aren't charities but act as government departments, whining and moaning about the lack or reduction of government funding. Here was a great letter on this issue. I quote:

David Robinson, the co-founder of Community Links, speaks for many publicly funded charities threatened by cuts (Charity chief: cuts may doom PM's big society, 30 December). While praising the "big society" concept that promises influence for third-sector organisations, he bemoans the pace of the withdrawal of public cash underpinning the sustainability of nearly a quarter of all charities.
But with over 250,000 charities in the UK, the last thing the UK needs is another. All may have been set up with the best of intentions, but there's massive duplication in giving and huge operational inefficiencies, with ferocious competition for funding, influence and profile. It's an unsustainable model at the best of times, so why should the taxpayer continue to prop it up now?
The third sector will be much better for consolidation where back-office costs can be cut, income streams enhanced and brand presence increased. Mergers are increasingly common, while one well-known firm of solicitors is touting for business using a line on how to conduct a hostile takeover of a charity. Trustees are beginning to recognise that increasing their public benefit is similar to increasing shareholder value. The jury's still out on the "big society", but the consequence of having paid charities to deliver public services over so many years is the inevitable commoditisation of the third sector.
It's about time that the third sector woke up to these unpalatable but necessary private-sector realities. In developing the most profuse charitable sector in the world, Britain has also created the most self-indulgent, where over one in 10 charities rely on state funding for more than half their income. David Robinson is right to be concerned about the pace of change but, "big society" or not, the coming storm is unavoidable. In 2011 the winners will be those organisations that start to behave more like corporate raiders than third-sector martyrs.

More charity options

2011-01-04T21:10:00.001-08:00

Given that I will soon be completing my studies, I thought of trying to find something local to assist. Also I am pushing Karn to join into doing something charitable, good for his development and good to give something back. Lazy git that he is, he was whining away but he has come up some ideas such as reading to partially or unsighted / blind people, assisting in website development, etc.

Anyway, I also checked out the Do-It website. Looks like a neat idea for people to search for volunteering opportunities, so I have plonked down couple of enquiries to assist as a Photographer with Community Link-Up, Trustee/director with Home-Start (Hillingdon) and Trustee with Creative Performance Limited. Dont have much detail on this, but the first one looks like it does projects with young uns, the second is for assisting people at their homes and the third is for creative performance. Lets see..

Quick updates on IT4CH

2011-01-01T01:01:00.001-08:00

I quote from Pat’s email: :

You may remember that BD asked at the last meeting whether I had been contacted by students at Nottingham University regarding charity support. I heard from the leader of the SIFE group, which is sponsored by HSBC, and I met them a few weeks ago. I was trying to work out the best way of utilizing this group and came up with a plan to set up an IT Club at Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham where they treat seriously ill children and teenagers from all over the East Midlands. It would mean having the students CRB checked but it could be worth it.
Our local Nat West branches (where our Social Enterprise account is held) decided to do some fund-raising for us. I suggested that Queens Medical could be the beneficiary and they were very pleased. They have raised money to purchase a high-spec laptop and I’ve arranged for them to go to QMC ON December 7^th to officially hand over the laptop. I also requested that the university students could also go and see what we do. the hospital teacher agreed. The teacher who does the Youth teaching is going to discuss how the Computer Club can be organized. Just doing repairs to IT when we no longer have a site would not work. A Computer Club could be ideal.

More on UK Charities’ income sources

2010-12-30T02:05:00.001-08:00

Saw this article in the financial times today. Its talking about how uk charities are struggling with getting money. I quote:

Fergus Finlay, head in Ireland of Barnardo’s, a children’s charity, has managed for the past two years to meet rising demand for services such as breakfast clubs for poor children, even though this has meant cutting staff salaries and eating into reserves. In common with the leaders of many other nonprofit organisations around the world, however, he anticipates still greater pressures ahead – and scant prospects for individual voluntary support to compensate for cuts in tax-funded public money.

See what I mean? why are charities getting funded by taxes? A fascinating graph gives some fascinating if incomplete information.

Now check out the middle graph and see where the 4th element is. This is Income from other sources, presumably from the government sector. I tried to see the original report, but it carefully avoids specifying where or what this “other sources” is. Now when you see that majority of the funding is actually coming from other sources, one is very surprised that the report does not break out this “other”. One could say that this is from the corporate sector but I rather doubt it.

Here is a partial list of schemes and projects that you can apply to to get government funding. Here is another government site itself which talks about what to do to get funding from the government. They even have a bloody separate domain name. www.governmentfunding.org.uk. This is all taking taxes from you and I, and giving them to charities without asking us and then the charities income is also tax free. And now they are talking about matching voluntary contributions with tax funded funds. What on earth? What on earth is this? This isnt fair and this is economic madness.

A charity funded by the Govt is not a charity #ukpolitics

2010-12-26T01:50:00.001-08:00

So there is this charity called as Booktrust Charity. It does good stuff, like giving out books for people to read when they are children. For me as a confirmed bibliophile, I like the idea, get more people to read about it.

But here’s what is confusing me. This is supposed to be a charity? So where is the charitable giving? Relying on the government to fund you means that you arent a charity, you are just another government department. Do you think that the government has some other sources of money other than mandatory extraction of money from your pocket and mine via taxes.

So the government, very rightly, said if you are a charity, then get charitable donations, why are you relying on the govt to fund philanthropic activities?

These charities which are reliant on govt funding screw it up for the other charities like ours. We do not rely on government funding. We rely on our volunteers who go about getting money, running to raise money, etc. etc. So how come they get govt funding while we dont? Because we are based upon the principle that if its charity, then its not going to be based upon forcible extraction of money.

Everybody who is backing this charity to have government funding, you dont want a charity, you want public investment. Bah!, this is intellectual incoherence of the first order.

Shambling around doing stuff

2010-10-24T02:08:00.001-07:00

It is slowly picking up speed on the charity front after the slow down over the summer. So what have I been up to?

1. Well, had a nice session with the SIFE LSE team who were formed for the first time this academic year. The financial trading game is going on fine, the interaction with TeachFirst is good and should pick up speed. Then we had a long chat about potential environmental projects and a shed load of projects popped up during the discussions, ranging from helping ex-convicts to homeless people to ex-soldiers who want to get back into civilian life and and and. Anyway, the chaps have decided to go away and check out the options. Spoke to one of our COO’s and he has kindly offered to sponsor a good sustainability project that has a clear business case (revenue, costs or both). So this promises to be good fun.

2. Help for Hero’s, we had a good quiz night and managed to raise more than £2000 for this charity. Good stuff, I think i will do a bit more for these fellows, lets see, I have some ideas which are brewing away.

3. Meeting somebody for the 100books projects next week which unfortunately sort of got paused because the main pusher of the project had to move jobs. But hopefully we can resurrect it and make something of this. Watch this space.

4. The team from Nottingham University SIFE team have met with Pat Ryan, who is our CEO of the IT4CH charity. They are apparently quite happy and excited to join into the charity and and and. Quite happy with this.

5. Talking about IT4CH, after pimping myself, managed to raise a £1000 cheque for the charity, that should help. We have also got a great volunteer who is speaking to various IT firms in London who could be potential donors of equipment.

6. An interesting project popped up at work during a sustainability meeting, and that’s a proposal to reduce the grammage of our printing paper from 80gsm to 75gsm. This could aim to reduce costs, save 15-12 tons of paper consumption daily. So am sponsoring this at my business unit to see if it works, if the client facing chaps don't object and the printing works. Quite a good idea, eh?

7. Didnt mention this before, but hosted a team from Essex University who were interested in knowing what we are doing with our sustainability piece within the bank. Quite an interesting talk, got two MD’s in as well to speak. This is one of our biggest selling points to graduates who love to join us because we live and breathe sustainability. Its indeed part of the DNA. Have you checked out our sustainability activities and report?? We walk the walk and talk the talk

The State of Philanthropy in India

2010-10-03T10:41:00.001-07:00

I keep on getting irritated by a commonly held view that India does not do charity and philanthropy and I received an email to this effect which made me write this response.

Did you know that India leads in philanthropy amongst developing nations? For example, a recent study by Bain found that we are double that of Brazil and six times that of China? That we give 1 rupee out of every 10 rupees earned? Long way to go before we catch up to developed nations, but hey, we are doing well and we are on the right path.
Since you had to have the obligatory dig at Hinduism, here's something that you might find of interest.

Lokeshwarananda, S. (1968) Charity and charitable services, Encyclopaedia of Social Work in India, vol. I, Planning Commission, Government of India, New Delhi.

Ranganathananda, S. (1968) Philosophy of social work: traditional, Encyclopaedia of Social Work in India, vol. II, Planning Commission, Government of India.

Do suggest you might want to read up on a good solid survey of the charitable and philanthropic historical background within Hinduism. Also covered are the Buddhist, Jain, Sikh and of course Islam contributions going back to ancient times.
You might want to read Pushpa Sundar's book on charity, Beyond Business: From Merchant Charity to Corporate Citizenship. You will see how the concept of corporatism within India, ranging back very many centuries, has always had a very big CSR element to it, much much before this was a twinkle in the eyes of the west. It wasn’t and still isn't captured properly because the epistemological frameworks (such as the joint family, common goods, village based properties, etc.) hid a lot of social work and charity.

If you want more details on what is happening in the country, check out the Directory of Indian Donor Organisations or the Guidebook on Indian scholarships. You can also review the Profile 300: Selected Voluntary Organisations in India by Murray Culshaw to have an idea of the immense range of social and voluntary work being done by Indians in a bewildering variety of areas, people, funding levels, etc.
I need not tell you the sterling work done by the Parsi Foundations as that's quite visible to everybody, but other foundations such as the Birla Foundation, the Rashtriya Gramin Vikas Nidhi, the Bombay Community Public Trust, and and and have a very long history and have been highly active in this area for many decades if not centuries.
Also something that you need to consider is the concept of company towns ranging from the Reliance's Jamnagar to Tata's Jamshedpur etc.
Then there is the concept of establishing religious institutions like Temples which would be philanthropic institutions in their own right with schools, hospitals, hospices and social work institutions in the villages, towns and cities right down the ages. By and large, these were constructed with corporate or zamindari or merchant or trading money. We end up looking at the big royal temples and forget that the vast majority of smaller temples in the smaller towns and villages were funded locally. The Hindu & Jain Seths and merchants would build wells, temples, rest houses. They would sponsor festivals and establish centres for Sanskrit or religious learning. Before you say that this was religious giving, remember that temples functioned as a crucial economic intermediary for India, they would have liquidity and would frequently loan monies to merchants, extend credit and help in the local economy. Corporate funded temples (usually through agricultural land, mela's, markets or entire villages deeded to the temple) would help livestock breeders, animal husbandry, artisans, long distance traders and creation of agricultural surplus.
Then comes the concept of guilds which was also hugely linked to philanthropy and charity. When a member of a guild would fall ill or go bankrupt or have commercial issues, they would get funded socially. Establishment of training schools or allowing internships/training was more evidence of social work and corporate philanthropy. Much research has been done in Gujarat, Maharashtra and in certain locations in South India (like in the Sari business) on this issue.
This kind of social work did not just work towards humans, but there are a significant number of recorded charitable donations for establishing hospices for sick and wounded animals. Did you know that there is recorded history that Hindu seths actually gave tons of money in the early 17th century to the Mughal Emperor so that cows wont be killed? (Check out Jourdain's 1905 book). Go figure.
Islamic madrasah's, rest houses, creation of public infrastructure,etc. was funded out of zakat and direct contributions by so many Muslim rulers and businessmen. There is a huge body of theological work relating to getting Muslims to be charitable. As a matter of fact, this is accurate for every religion that I have studied in India, but that's beyond this email.
This idea that Bill Gates is going to come and insist that Indian rich people should give made me feel a case of déjà vu. When the East India Company started to rule India, it also started forcing/encouraging/motivating/pushing Indian businessmen to donate to creating schools. I remember reading something about this collector in Surat in early 1900's asking local seth's to donate money to build a school rather than waste them on fireworks. Welcome to western colonialism redux. Bah!
But they worked, a huge number of British "Sir, Rao Bahadur, Rao Saheb, Sardar, Khan's" were created by the company in return for charitable donations for schools, public libraries, meeting halls, rest houses, wells, roads, hospitals, etc. etc. Indian merchants were quite active in helping governments in times of public crisis, for example during the regular famines which struck India in the British Period.
Lets talk about other organisations. Take Ram Krishna Mission, a Hindu organisation which has been in existence for many many moons and is primarily run through donations. It operates hospitals, schools, hospices, libraries and and and. And I am sure somebody will raise the bogey that it tried to claim non-Hindu status, its less well known that this was driven by the fear that the communists in west Bengal would take control over its schools, ironically enough, there is more protection for minority schools rather than Hindu schools, but there you go. But to get back to the point, the RK Mission is not casteist or what have you. And this is just one example, there are countless more examples.
Anyway, next time somebody tells you that India doesn’t do philanthropy or charity, tell them to go suck a lemon, what we have done is pretty good, and while there is always room for improvement and we should improve, there is nothing bad about the country either.

Charitable activities update

2010-09-24T23:52:00.001-07:00

Gosh, I haven't updated this blog for a long time. Well, have been on holiday, no? :)

1. IT4CH trustee meeting

Had an interesting time when I chaired the trustee meeting. Met with a volunteer who is offering to call up IT companies in London to get hold of their old kit and perhaps give donations. I find it humbling to see and meet with these volunteers. They, for no other reason, but to help out others who are more unfortunate than others, spend their own money and time. Wonderful, and this is what I love about humans, despite their propensity to hack off other’s heads and do mayhem, they also love to help others. Attaboy! I am also going to start writing one photo essay on each volunteer or donation per month, hope to get more content generated for the website. Have you visited it yet? More photos coming up soon. Also attended and spoke at some banking and IT dinners. The good part of this is that they pay the charity a honorarium when I do this. Killing two birds with one stone, eh?

2. Swansea teaching

Will be making my annual pilgrimage to Swansea to talk to the young ones about how to succeed (lol), how to manage their money, and what kind of financial management should they learn. Also about career choices and stuff. Will let you know more when that happens, its sometime in October.

3. SIFE Annual launch

Had a nice time with the business advisory group meeting with the SIFE UK launch, met with several students who were all passionate about helping others with doing business projects. One young lady from Durham wanted more help, so might pop up there one day to see what I can help with. My own group relating to LSE here is spinning up, they are hiring more people at the freshers fair for the LSE SIFE group. Will be meeting them next week. So I am quite happy and looking forward to doing much with this project.

4. MBS mentoring

Have signed up to do mentoring with my old alma mater in Manchester. So have submitted few selections for the students. Found it curious that many students were selecting every bloody industry for career choices under the sun. That’s not good, one has to be focussed. You cant say that you want to be in banking and in pharmaceuticals. It shows signs of a confused mind.

5. For some reason, the 100books initiative has gone a bit cold which is a bit of a shame. I was really looking forward to working with that one. Oh! well, no worries, next time :)

I am also inundated with requests to fund people’s bike rides, climbs, marathons, and and and. While I do try to help, its not fun to turn down many. Keeping my powder dry and money for the ones which I am looking at..Another reason why I didnt give any money to

Anyway, more later :)

Charity Photographic competitions and other news on the charitable front

2010-09-04T23:41:00.001-07:00

I am conscious that i haven't posted here for some time, it has been manically busy at work and then I left for holiday so wanted to drop a line on what I have been up to in the past month or so.

The IT4CH charity is now moving from up north down to London, it just makes it easier for our CEO and our team to do this from London.
We are also negotiating with several local authorities to lease their buildings for us to keep our spare equipment in, this promises to be of much use.
I put in some funding proposals for carbon change improvement products back in the firm, but dont think they got selected. Shame, next time I will do better :). Am trying to see if we can get some of this stuff formally pushed and funded in a separate matter
SIFE is powering up for this academic year, as usual, I will be at LSE but have also offered to help Essex out. As I mentioned before, i am considering doing something with them on the academic and research front and I thought it might be able to kill 2 birds with one stone.
The discussions with Manchester Business School proceed sporadically, I am specially happy about an internship/graduate recruitment proposal, lets see, early days yet.
And finally, am thinking about submitting my photo essay on the Whittington Hospital in North London to this photo competition. I realise what we do with the kids is not so visually attractive, perhaps Disha would have been better but its way out in India and dont know when I will be there next. I quote from the site:

PhotoPhilanthrophy believes in the power of photography to inspire hope and understanding and to connect people around the world. All subjects photographed should be treated with respect, compassion and dignity. PhotoPhilanthropy reserves the the right to reject any submission based on quality, content or theme. All submissions will be reviewed by the PhotoPhilanthropy team for accuracy of information. Written essays may be edited for clarity.

Submitted photos must depict the work of a charitable organization (designated by 501c3 in the US, or international equivalent) and be presented as a photo essay. All photographs in the essay must have been taken within the last 3 years. Photographers may enter two essays in the same year. An essay entered in a previous year of the competition may not be re-entered.

For all submissions, collaboration with the charitable organization will be verified. For this reason it is mandatory to submit a contact name and email of the person you worked with at the organization.

Upon completion of review, accepted photo essays will be posted on the PhotoPhilanthropy website.

What do you think? do you think I have a shot at it with the photographs from the hospital? I realise the differences between the visual impact of a hospital in north London versus say a charity in a hauntingly beautiful but bloody poor place in say Nepal or hot/dry/dusty Sudan, but what the heck, all part of the learning, eh?

Photo Essay: An evening with a chocolatier

2010-08-14T07:45:00.000-07:00

We were invited to a charity event to raise funds for VSO where a chocolatier would show us the art of making chocolate. Me being the original piggy wiggy, signed up post haste. Well, it's all for a great cause, no?

The chocolatier lady in question was brilliant, originally from France (yes, notice the T Shirt) she had training in the USA and on the continent. She is just brilliant. Did I mention she was brilliant? No? well, she was, her fascinating French American accent was just perfect. You can see small glasses of port in front of her. This is something we drank at the end to enjoy with the final chocolate taste of pure chocolate and Madeira Port wine, it was extraordinary, the combination was breathtaking. Put the chocolate in yout mouth, then leave for one minute.
The melting point of good chocolate is 35 degrees so it will slowly start melting in your mouth. Tilt your head back so that it starts to slowly move from the tongue down the back of your tongue and down your throat. At this time, take a sip of the port (or any other liqueur as you wish). The two flavours will mix. Hot diggity dog. Brilliant stuff. She did say that it's good that you don't smoke, because apparently smoking kills the taste buds. My taste buds belong to a donkey, so that ship has sailed.

Anyway, we were lead into a room which was quite tastefully decorated with orchids. She first gave a nice little overview. Chocolate consists of cocoa butter and cocoa powder. Adding milk makes it white and if not, then it's dark chocolate. Chocolate tastes seriously different depending upon where it is grown. Cuban chocolate has tobacco overtones, chocolate grown in Papua New Guinea has flowery overtones. Wow, I had no idea, I will have to check this out. Then she went on a bit of a rampage on Europe and its silly labelling laws for what is and what isn't chocolate. The fat/butter content is what makes the difference. English chocolates are not chocolates, they are sweet stuff, and that’s as far as she would go. So why are people using fat instead of cocoa butter?
Well, it turns out that cocoa butter is also used in cosmetics. And the best cocoa butter is used there as it's far more remunerative to plonk it into lipstick and other skin creams rather than use in chocolate. So cheaper chocolate is usually made out of animal or vegetable fats or both. So if you are a vegetarian, check the ingredients and she said that almost all fats have animal fats in there. I had an evil chuckle there.

There were eight plates on each table, each plate was numbered and had chocolate wafers, weighing about 10-15 grams each.

She made a game out of it. We had a sheet of paper each where a list of ingredients were listed on the right and then there were eight boxes. So the idea was that we pick up one, smell and sniff it – do a Count Snifferu on it. Then take a bite and taste. Flavours were primary and secondary. So we had to identify which flavours were mixed up.

These were some of the ingredients, cardamom, chilly, basil, lemon, garlic, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, lime, coconut, aniseed, rosemary, lemongrass, cinnamon, etc. Can you just imagine the smorgasbord of tastes and flavours?
So we had vanilla and coconut; nutmeg and cardamom; lavender and lemon; lime and ginger; aniseed and coffee. These were for the light and milk chocolate. Then came the dark chocolates. They contain 71% cocoa. Lemon and basil; raspberry and rosemary; orange and chilli. By this time, I was feeling queasy, too much chocolate, man. Not good for my tummy at all.
Did you know men and kids prefer white or vanilla chocolates, while women prefer dark and complex chocolates? I didn't know that. She said that is what she observes in her shop, but then I prefer dark chocolate. Maybe its my latent feminine tendencies coming out. HA!. Also, guess what? Out of the 40 odd people in the room, only two were men. Go figure.

After each taste, she would ask us to eat a cracker and then drink some water to cleanse the palate and make sure that there is no after effects of the chocolate lingering around in your mouth. It was a brilliant exercise and something that I recommend highly. Next stop for me would be to try to join a chocolate cooking class or something. But here’s a small piece of advice, take it easy, you can really ruin it if you barf after eating too much chocolate. As it so happens, the weekend after that, I got to see Chocolat again. I love this movie. I think chocolate is one of the bestest things in life, but not too much, gives one a tummy ache.

Progress this week

2010-07-18T03:08:00.001-07:00

Well, Its been a very busy week at work, but at the same time, there was quite a lot of movement on the charity side. Here are the few updates:

We had a good initial meeting with my friend Christian who is now going to be the Director of MBA at Essex Business School and another colleague from the bank. We discussed various ways that we can link up with the educational opportunities in terms of course ratification, courses in risk and insurance, providing more training for our chaps, etc. These things take time, lets see how far this goes. We might end up going up to Essex, doing couple of lectures and then discussing this further.
Last week I mentioned about meeting up with a person from Manchester Business School. Couple of more people from MBS got in touch with me, I am quite excited to see what we can do with them but the timing sucks at the moment. Will need to pick this up in September, frantically busy at the moment with the august 2nd week workshop and then Baba/Ma arriving and and and. Also filled out a rather long and a bit clunky questionnaire from the President, University of Manchester. Seriously, guys, get some professional help on that.
IT4CH: Well, we now have this charity officially recognised as the charity for IT for the bank :), quite chuffed about this as well. This means that the supply of systems is now on a sustainable basis.
200 laptops for schools. We got to meet another school and we will be donating 200 laptops to this school most probably on an annual basis going forward. Lets see how this works out.
100Books. Got an email from Praveen Swami, the main karta dhartha for this charity in India which aims to provide 100 books to each government school. He is looking for volunteers in Delhi who can help out. So if you are based in Delhi and can help out, please do join the facebook page and offer help.
Finally, got in touch with this wonderful lady, Lyndsey Buchanan, via my friend, Annie Tennant (who is a total charity fiend in her own right). She is running a marathon to raise funds for the Bhopal Medical Appeal. Will hopefully meet her at Annie’s wedding and see what else can I do to help.
Oh! by the way, completely forgot, have joined up in a mentoring effort at the firm, hope to meet my first mentee in the next few weeks, lets see what comes up..

Help out Indian schools with a donation of books

2010-07-09T22:34:00.001-07:00

One of my friends, Nilanjana Roy, invited me to this facebook group. The concept is simple, please put some money and a coordinator together, get about 100 books in various genres and then gift to a Indian government school. Brilliant idea, eh? Offered to help with some money and suggestions here. Early days yet, so lets see what happens. I am happy to take this out further. Quite exciting, eh? I think this can be a brilliant idea :) Please do consider joining into this and helping out this project if you can. Ma Saraswati will indeed bless you with 4 additional brains that will exist in a pocket dimension attached with an invisible wormhole in your left ear, you will be frightfully brilliant, handsome and people will admire your singing and the shape of your feet.

What are you waiting for? Go sign up to the facebook page. Incidentally, check out who has joined, some of the greatest and good of Indian society, eh? Another reason..

So what else has been happening in the charity space last week?

1. Had a nice little corporate dinner and earned about £450 for IT4CH as a honorarium.

2. Proposed some ideas for a sustainability competition at work, which included proposals for essay competitions, academic studies/paper competitions, funding for sustainable products, etc. Lets see where that goes.

3. Now that I am in transaction banking, I am trying to find out ways to get something green into the payments space. I can just see making good amount of dosh being green, so have couple of nice little meetings coming up.

4. Met up with a great chap from my old alma mater, Manchester Business School. Over the past few years, a new director has taken over and he has really shook up the place in a good way. Previously we had some bloody boring directors. but the new director is good. So we had some nice chats about things we can do with the firm and the school such as funded scholarships, joint research links, perhaps discounts for domestic students wanting to do an MBA, etc. etc. Lets see what happens, I have offered to mentor 3 students this year anyway…

The influence of a teacher stops at eternity

2010-07-05T21:55:00.001-07:00

You might recall that we are trying to improve the financial literacy of British children by an investment trading game that we run for school children. One of the ways we are thinking about expanding the scope is by training teachers to do this rather than rely on the LSE SIFE team.

So one of the things that the firm sponsors is TeachFirst. This is an initiative which tries to bring teachers into challenged secondary schools in the UK. The charity assists in helping top graduated become excellent teachers. Not too many, 5-600 teachers per year and the idea is to make a small but significant difference. So we had a nice little meeting with them, along with the LSE SIFE team, we discussed ways of getting the trading game packaged up and then given to the teachers, we discussed ways of getting a competition going and again, funding for this wouldn't be a major issue.

Also spoke to our internal brokerage about seeing if they could support us, but lets see where that goes.

I am quite chuffed about this all, if we can get these 5-600 teachers yearly to use the trading game and push it out to the students, hey, big impact :) Very happy.

News on the #charity front

2010-06-19T10:57:00.001-07:00

Apologies for missing out the last week’s update, I have just moved off from my current project and am spinning up a giant new transformation programme which is making my hair hurt, eyes itch and toes curl. Nothing big or huge to report on the past two week’s progress but some little ones.

1. In last year’s SIFE competition, London School of Economics team, which I had the privilege to advice, won the rookie competition and the HSBC financial literacy prize. Very chuffed indeed. Very good work, girls.

2. The SIFE team and I are meeting TeachFirst on Monday. To see how we can get the trading game and our financial literacy mission into the teaching of these excellent high calibre teachers. If 800 of these excellent teachers annually pick up our game and we squirt this out to the schools, this will become brilliant and big.

3. Am also working on how to see this teacher pack business become global in nature, but very hush hush for now :)

4. Have also been thinking about old laptops. The fact that I found out that so many students are unable to study at home because they dont have pc’s (IN THIS internet DAY AND AGE!!!) is shocking. Or even at work, quite a lot of schools are disadvantaged in this. Do not have good equipment. So am working with our IT department to see if we can kick loose some 100-200 old laptops for one school as an experiment. We are going to go meet the school in 2 weeks time, so wait for that :)

5. I attended a charity fund raiser for VSO. Quite impressive. Getting more details on it. And it was a chocolate tasting event, so wait up for that essay.

Update on World Environment Day & fundraising for IT4CH

2010-06-06T02:52:00.001-07:00

Well, it was World Environment Day on Friday and there were a ton of activities that the bank was involved in. Check out the list of organisations involved with the firm on the back of the T shirt which I had to wear. In the interests of saving resources, I had to wear a T shirt which was at least 4 sizes too small. Somebody described it as “clingy” and he was being kind.

Very conveniently, the graphic points to where I need to reduce as well.

Now that we have finished taking the p out of me, let me get to the meat of the matter. We managed to raise more than £500 pounds in contributions just from contributions from people. The idea was that if you dressed down, you get to pay £1, if you were still dressed in a suit, then you get to pay £2. Which was quite nice and interesting. People contributed much more frequently and we were quite chuffed. Other sites like Sheffield and Birmingham are also going to contribute via the virgin giving website so at the moment, we dont know the full amount.

Sometime in the next couple of months, we will get the CEO of the Charity and perhaps a hospital teacher to come into the firm, accept the actual donation from one of the senior managers who is the sponsor of this programme and perhaps even get the climate champions to visit one of the hospitals to see where the firm’s equipment is being utilised. The idea that our old PC’s are being recycled by people who are getting trained on PC repair and then given to kids was very well received. Quite a lot of ideas popped out from the climate champions who want to help the firm out even more. So excellent :)Very chuffed about this all. Good engagement with all.

IT 4 children in hospital selected as the official charity for World Environment Day

2010-05-30T11:32:00.001-07:00

I was quite chuffed to hear that the IT4CH charity was selected as the official charity for the firm which is celebrating World Environment Day. This is for next Friday, June 4th. The idea is that people are going to dress down, if you are wearing a suit and are square and boring and a total git, you have to pay £2, if not, and you are cool and excitable and a thoroughly good egg, you will get charged £1.

Here’s hoping people will be boring as heck and pay up more for the charity :). In the meantime, I thanked the various senior IT managers who have been instrumental in helping to release our old equipment for the charity. This is really good stuff, feels good to work for a firm which obviously cares for the environment, society and people. It shows up in the highest brand values and regularly tops the polls for the best place to work competitions.

Separately, we now have taken possession of a nice little property in London which we can use to store more equipment and use it for offices. I think this will truly help the charity move further along. I met Julia Ryan, who was the person who came up with the original idea for the charity. She heads up the arts department in a Hollywood TV studio with a clutch of hits under her belt. She manages to get us quite a lot of celebrity gift items which go further to help us along by auctioning them :).

Brave Smiling Children at Whittington Hospital, a visit for the charity

2010-05-22T12:20:00.001-07:00

We decided to go visit the Whittington Hospital in North London where some of the firm’s equipment has been donated. Here are some photographs (and slideshow) of the visit which was very emotional indeed.

The hospital.

Here’s Dick Whittington’s cat.

Couple of the bank’s PC’s still in their packing cases.

Small firms in Wales looking for mentors

2010-05-16T01:39:00.001-07:00

Ok, so right off the bat, I have to admit to having a sneaky admiration for the Welsh. Of all the home nations, they do not have as strong an identity as the Scots or such a history like the Northern Irish, nor are they as rich as the English. However, by Jove, they are just wonderful in their warmth, their togetherness, their desire to be one with the land, their love of the language and so on and so forth. This is highly visible when you see things like football and rugby games, but those are the very visible signs. It is at the informal levels that you can see evidence that a strong, yet understated, current of nation building is happening. Mix in the rumours that King Arthur was in Wales, dragons can still be found in some of the valleys, mention the bravery of the miners and the ancient history of tin mining in Wales, the ruined castles, and all go forward to make a plucky little admirable country.

With this background in mind, I agreed a few years ago to teach at Swansea University School of Economics and Business. Once or twice every year, I toddle over to Swansea, spending eight hours on the train, to meet with the students and faculty at the business school, talking about a variety of topics ranging from banking, financial institutions, stochastic calculus, regulatory regimes, career opportunities in Banking, etc. In addition, I am also part of the advisory board of the business school. Something that we in the board are heavily pushing is to try and fix two things within Wales. (1) The low productivity of the Welsh economy and (2) the diabolically low rate of job creation and ‘Small and Medium Scale Enterprise’ (SME) creation.

Consequently, the business school has been heavily engaged in pushing entrepreneurship and economics as a discipline, in conjunction with a variety of local Welsh authorities, sprinkled with a liberal dosage of EU funding. It is a steep climb. One way of checking the health of the local economy is to walk up and down the high street. Over the past three years, the Swansea high street has been-to put it politely- pockmarked with a whole series of boarded up shops, charity shops, pound shops, kebab shops and the like. The number of buildings with weeds growing out of their walls and roofs is astounding. I have never seen anything like this before. In other words, the demand is simply not there or even if it is there, the demand is being fulfilled from somewhere else rather than from Swansea high street. One does not need to say that an economy exhibiting a high street like this has challenges.

Today I was shocked to hear that in Swansea, 42% of the jobs belong to the public sector. Tesco is the largest employer with a majority of jobs relating to the bottom of the food chain and the next one is Admiral (the insurance firm), where the jobs relate mainly to call centres. Now, there is nothing wrong with this, but one cannot really have high productive growth, good value generation and good high paying white collar jobs simply based upon call centre, checkout and public sector jobs. It is like a bloody inverted pyramid with most of the jobs frankly being administrative /unproductive from the public sector or from very large firms. In the event that one large firm decides to up and leave, it shocks the locality horribly, which doesn’t recover at all, as we have seen over the past few decades losing one large manufacturing firm after another.

One needs the manufacturing jobs, the high value added service jobs and other similar jobs. Research has pointed out that a good heavy duty sprinkling of small and medium scale enterprises provides the bedrock of prosperity, jobs, good social relations, high productivity growth, demand and in turn offers the funding for good public services. In this case, we are upside down, as we are overloaded with a public sector which is being funded via debt or grants and in the coming decades, both avenues of funding will either become very expensive or rare.

So what do we do? What the business school is therefore doing in conjunction with various Welsh governmental bodies is try to encourage the formation and proper functioning of SMEs in Wales. At this moment, the programme is primarily oriented towards Swansea and Bangor environs, but will extend to all of Wales in the fullness of time.

The programme is based upon a pilot programme run in North West England where SME owner/managers were given up to £10,000 equivalent of training, coaching, education and mentoring. This resulted (as measured by an independent evaluation) in an equivalent return of minimum £15k value to each firm’s owner, average turnover increase of £200k, profit increases and 1/5^th of the pilot study members went on to set up new ventures. Soft benefits included increased job creation, better leadership, improved staff development and a better motivated workforce. These are good results and now it is being rolled out to Wales with an aim to train 1000 SME owners in 2010 – 2012.

I have set up and run several small enterprises and one of the biggest problems a small enterprise owner has is that there is nobody to talk to, nobody to bounce ideas off, nobody to tell or teach about technical skills, no ability to grow from a single man team to a multi man team, no ability to stand back and evaluate oneself and the strategy of the firm. The programme hits these points. The owner / managers devote 2 days a month for 10 months in a variety of targeted intervention programmes relating to leadership, team management, economics, financial, strategy, business problem solving, etc.

Part of the programme includes a 1-2-1 coaching session with a professional coach over the 10 months. They also have a volunteer mentor from business, with whom they end up spending about an hour a month or so. The mentor (they are debating whether to call them as grey wolves or wise owls) provides an independent voice to the SME owner/manager and just provides that little bit of help and independent advice that they so desperately need. The first meeting is face to face, but the subsequent meetings are over email/phone or over a beer. The first sessions have just started in January 2010 and the programme is looking for suitably qualified bankers, consultants, relationship managers and business people who have experience of SME’s (either directly owning, working for or lending/advising them).

If there is anybody in and around Wales who can assist, or who has any links with Wales or who travels to Wales on business or perhaps just somebody who might be interested in making a direct difference in getting Wales up the prosperity curve, please drop me a note. I am very happy to link you up with the programme manager. Don’t be shy or sell yourself short, many times these SME owners just need somebody to talk to and have a bit of a common sense debate and discussion over business matters. They are not looking for heavy duty Lord Digby Jones, but Joe Blogs who is in business. This is obviously good for us, but more importantly, it’s good for our country and good for Wales.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

SIFE Financial Literacy Awards

2010-04-23T23:12:00.001-07:00

Over the past few months, I have been working as a business advisor to a newbie team from the London School of Economics who have developed a trading game for school kids. This is under the SIFE programme, or Students In Free Enterprise which is sponsored, besides other firms, by my firm as well. While the teams are basically off to do good things to encourage enterprise, my firm sponsors a prize for the best financial literacy programme. As it so happens, I volunteered to be a judge at the financial literacy programme judgement.

There were a total of about 16 odd teams who had applied, then the SIFE management did a first cut of them to bring them down to 11 and then another cut down to 5. These teams were then put forward to a group of bankers who were the judges. (I obviously recused myself from the LSE presentation)

I sat there and was listening to the students who have actually delivered a variety of programmes. Some examples:

1. Working with entrepreneurs and small firms in distress to improve their financial management of their businesses

2. Working with micro lending firms in Ghana, Philippines, India, Bangladesh etc. to improve their handling of their finances and that of their clients. A great example came of their work when the typhoon struck the Philippines and devastated one of the groups that the micro lender was helping. But because they had savings and some idea of cashflow management and assets, they could recover from the disaster and were back in business chop chop. Now that’s making a real difference.

3. Immigrants / asylum seekers and refugees who are waiting for processing are stuck in tower blocks, with nothing to do, cant do jobs, in damn near poverty levels. So this university teacher got together, gave them financial management teaching, helped them setup a baking and cooking business and the women have started to generate up to £100-200 per sale in profit. Small numbers, but great work. This will help regenerate the area, create a community around these women and are also creating an international cook book. Fascinating idea, eh?

4. Several projects related to teaching kids on how to setup their own businesses, such as creating jewellery out of recycled materials and then sell them at school fairs.

5. A team was training kids on demand and supply, how trading works and got them all excited about this.

6. Getting chemistry students to create drugs and then bring in Glaxo and Kings College London (my current alma mater) to assist in show how that drug can be commercialised. Now that’s a brilliant idea, no? take chemistry students from the technical to the business to the commercial. Now if that isn't going to encourage entrepreneurship and value addition, then what is?

This is all being done by students in the undergraduate degree courses. And they are doing stuff that adults are not. They have the passion, I loved to see the determination and happiness and dedication and enthusiasm shining from their eyes. Based on the back of a fag pack, just these 5 teams that I saw have made a difference, a real tangible difference to about 10k people around the world. Now that’s creditable.

Also I am very chuffed that the LSE team was recognised as the best team :), very happy for them, those boys and girls did very well, very impressed. Here are some stats from this report.

Through the HSBC Financial Literacy Programme, SIFE teams apply for grants ranging from $250 to $1000 to help fund projects of their own creation that stimulate economic opportunity by helping others develop the personal financial management skills necessary to achieve financial independence.

More than 1,506 grants awarded.

2,202 projects completed.

25,250 college students participated.

HSBC contributed more than $3 million to SIFE and to support teams' efforts.

In 2009, HSBC disbursed 287 grants to college teams.

All in all, I am very proud of these kids. They are doing something for their community. Not sitting back and just wasting time on beer or what have you. Making the world a better place. I speak to so many kids and students in my career. Very few actually have the gumption, courage and determination to succeed. Having a social or charitable conscience usually means that they are going to be good employees or great friends. And it is not difficult at all, its quite easy to help. So my plans are to see if we can help other universities and actually try to increase the coverage as well as the depth of offerings to actually reach out to more people (both here in the UK and in India)

Worshipful Company of Information Technologists gets a royal charter

2010-04-17T01:37:00.001-07:00

I am a bit involved with the worshipful company charitable activities and it was nice to hear that we have now got a royal charter. I quote the announcement:

The Royal Charter Celebrations

As you will be aware The Queen has graciously granted our Petition for a Royal Charter. The celebrations are to be held on Thursday 17th June 2010 and by pressing the button on the right you can view a short presentation that tells you about the background to this event and explains how you can join in the celebrations.

Please have your sound on - it only takes a few minutes. You will also be able to access the booking form via the attachments tab in the presentation. Please note that places will be limited so it would be wise to secure your place early.

At this stage we have to limit tickets to The Mansion House Banquet to 2 per member. Space permitting, we may be able to accommodate additional guests - please follow our instructions on the booking form. If you have any questions please call Trisha on 020 7600 1992

Thank You!

I dont think I can make it, but it promises to be pretty good so will try to move things around :), good for them.

Change of strategy for charity, cannot handle feral children

2010-03-27T02:05:00.001-07:00

Guess what happens? We are trying to train the apprentices to learn how to fix the PC’s and laptops which need refurbishment. This is for those kids who have dropped out of school, those who do not have a skill, those who might have criminal, drug or domestic violence histories. So many of our apprentices have been trained up sufficiently that many have setup their own businesses, some have gone forward and actually started doing a degree or doing a job for other firms. It is very good to read and love seeing the apprentices doing this.

But one has to remember what kind of people we are talking about, some these are not really the nice, listening, wanting to be educated people. Some examples of what the charity management has gone through. Have had their equipment stolen so many times. People steal the pc’s and laptops which are meant for terminally ill children or long term ill children. They sell this off to get drugs or beer. Abusing the staff. Breaking the law. Trashing the unit where teaching happens. Making prank calls to the office. It is a small charity and we do not have that many staff to handle it. All are working for very low pay or none. It is simply impossible to motivate the staff up in Nottingham to deal with these ferals. Our CEO is 80 years of age and is still extremely active, but surely one cannot accept this kind of behaviour. Totally unacceptable.

So we have, very regretfully, decided to wrap up our business in Nottingham and move down to London and the south east. We will be able to better control the charity and provide more management attention. We will also be able to work closely with the police and local authority to get them going in controlling these ferals.

I am deeply disappointed and very very upset. This was a very good thing which we were doing. We were busting our gut to improve the performance in a really depressed part of the country. Giving employment, hoping to improve the lives of a bunch of NEETs, getting equipment which can then be given to sick children. And so on and so forth. And now? Really really disappointed and sad that Nottingham will not be able to make use our of resources.

But hopefully we will do better in London and the South East.

Prove that you made a difference

2010-03-06T02:21:00.001-08:00

In the last post on this topic, I talked about how we are looking to help the LSE SIFE Team identify whether or not they are actually making a difference. At end of the day, we need to make sure that we are actually providing information, training, documentation etc. within the trading game, so that the students are actually learning things. We cannot really subject them to an examination, but what we can do is to have them fill out a questionnaire. When we met, the team mentioned that their questionnaire wasn’t really helping. Either the students were marking all on the high side or not marking at all. So we offered the help of our communications expert to evaluate and validate their questionnaire.

We met three members of the team yesterday and had a good conversation. I was reminded of the fact that I have quite a similar conversations with every project. The basic question that we ask in project or change management is, ok, so you want to run this project, but what do you want to achieve? What do you think is “good” is? What we don’t want to do is to be Columbus, start off not knowing where we are going and on reaching not knowing where we are, on coming back not having an idea where we had been and we do this all on somebody else’s money. So, it’s important to know what we are going to measure and what we are going to deliver, otherwise how will we know that the project is successful? Show me the money. Talk is cheap, prove that you made a difference. Show that what you did actually did something.

In my experience, that is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks. Speaking with the project sponsor, it takes time to extricate what benefits are going to be seen? Are we talking about process efficiency or reduction in operational loss, or revenue benefits, or what? It’s vital to clearly identify the benefits that we will deliver. And frankly, it has to be short and sweet, not a full tome. In other words, your sponsor should be able to explain the benefits of the project in 2-3 top level sentences, in about the time it takes for the sponsor and her boss to take an elevator ride (hence elevator speech).

Same with the SIFE group, Hay, Katie and I discussed what they are trying to achieve and how they can measure it. We gave them ideas like, find out how many students want to go on to do a higher degree BEFORE they do the trading game and then ask them AFTER the game about: “How to use a control group to measure progress and performance if you don’t want to submit pre and post questionnaires to the same audience. How to have mini case studies, use cartoon characters, how to put questions like “I feel confident that I am….” “I know about xyz”, talk about 1-5 (strongly disagree to strongly agree) scaling versus a yes / no answer choice.”

We further discussed the HSBC competition, their presentation and preparation needed. There is so much to do! I look forward to meeting the full team of business advisors this Thursday and will report back then.

Late breaking news: there are definitely angels in the bank who look out for business advisors. An angel emailed me out of the blue with some brilliant suggestions and actual help which can further improve this project. More on that in the next post.

Go Trade Young Man!

2010-02-14T01:42:00.001-08:00

The firm i work in is a sponsor of an international NGO called SIFE (see www.sife.org), which brings together business and university students to assist the students to learn how to make a difference to their communities through projects. This in turn provides them with valuable training on a variety of different ways ranging from teaching the basics of banking to understanding cashflows to revenue generation to economics. As part of this engagement, volunteers from firms become part of business advisory groups for particular projects and help guide/assist the students in achieving the objectives of their projects. Look at the website, these young chaps are actually making a huge difference.

Personally speaking, I have been involved with SIFE since 2008 and it has been a very exciting time. To sit there with the students and see their bright, passionate eyes light up when they talk about how they are making a difference is amazing. I have sat in meetings where I have had students helping a bunch of villagers in Ghana setup their own cooperative to weave baskets and sell them, training NEET youngsters how to improve their financial well being in Birmingham, teaching some long term unemployed how to explore additional opportunities for employment by using job search databases etc. in Swansea, etc. You know what makes me humble? It is to see these kids wanting to change the world, having a good design to do so, the determination to succeed and the confidence to actually deliver. We are helping them to become better managers and actually make a difference., something that actually makes me proud to work for HSBC.

As part of this exercise, I am on the business advisory group for the London School of Economics and Political Science. This kicked off in late November and I have been in touch with a very bright young man on email and finally managed to meet him and another colleague last week. This is a post about that conversation. The team conducts a stock and foreign exchange trading game for school students (usually 6^th Form) in London. Their objective is to familiarise the students with the logistics of trading, the basics of demand and supply, the stock market, the Foreign Exchange Market, etc. In the initial presentation, they said that they hoped that the school students would decide to go into higher university education, pick economics or business studies. All laudable objectives, but then I asked the two SIFE students, what’s in it for you? The answer I got back was “fun”.

Which is good, but I would have expected some more concrete outputs and benefits as an answer from the SIFE students but more about that later. I also inquired about their business plan. Now I have seen a presentation, but unfortunately, I hate presentations. Far too many times, presentations are used as documents and one can go animation / graphic crazy. If one is talking about a business plan or a project plan, a word document helps to clarify exactly what they are trying to achieve, show who are involved, timelines, budgets, measures of success, etc. etc.. We are going to work on putting a business plan together, so that it’s very clear on what this project will do and deliver. More importantly, this will become sustainable and when the next year’s LSE SIFE students come in, they can build on what has already been done rather than start from scratch.

But to go back to the success criteria, I delved a bit deeper into it. I asked them about how they are going to measure their success? What is in it for them? It has to be a measurable quantity, because you can’t manage what you cannot measure and if we are going to run a proper sustainable business, then clear metrics are important. I suggested that they might think about actual trading or run a fantasy trading game where one’s progress can be measured.

I specifically gave an example of an experiment that I am running with my son, who is now 14 years of age. I have been training and teaching him on the basics of stock market investments since he was 12. Every quarter he gets £100 to invest, I ask questions about his stock selection but I will never say no. Over the past 18 months or so, he has now invested a tidy sum. Till about the middle of last year, he was seriously in the red, but now he is up about 33%. Given that I have told him that this money that he is making will help his education and buy his first car (and presumably to impress girls…), you can see the motivation behind him being pretty clued up in trying to understand the intricacies of the UK market.

I am using First Direct as (FD) our broker; it is one of the cheapest to trade (a tenner per trade) and has a good set of analytical tools. The downside of using FD is that it does not allow you to trade US stocks, which is a shame. The students got quite excited about this and wanted to discuss it more. We talked about potentially giving prizes to the highest return earner per period (quarter, six monthly, yearly), perhaps linking with our First Direct colleagues to provide some help, etc. I am meeting them this week to take this to the next stage.

What I am quite excited about is that this project is educating more students to take responsibility for their own financial results. Higher education is obviously going to become more and more expensive. If they can be helped to start on a stock trading trajectory from their early days, with dividends reinvested, they would definitely go into and come out of higher education with less debt and better financial health than now.

What else can we tell them? What am I missing? If you had a 14-15 year old brother, sister, son or daughter, what can we do to help them as far as stock market trading is concerned? Any links? Remember that the actual project is being done by undergraduate LSE students who are in full time education, so we have to propose simple low impact solutions, nothing that will suck up major amounts of time, money or energy can work. Any ideas? Has anybody else across the world seen anything like this? Is there something concrete that the bank can do?

Charity: Who Cares?

2009-12-23T13:15:00.001-08:00

budget planner – Mint.com

Another tiny step forward

2009-06-15T13:05:00.001-07:00

You might remember that I wrote a photo essay on the Bhopal Charity some time back. I was so pleased to see an email ping into my in-box today morning. Indeed God is great, he sent another good Samaritan down to help those lovely kids. See she wrote a response on the above mentioned link.

This is something I would like to contribute to financially, how do I get in touch with the administrators?

Small steps, indeed small steps :)

The power of the youth

2009-04-06T13:20:00.001-07:00

Aston University invited me to deliver a lecture, so thought of using the time to go visit SIFE.

Meet a bunch of very enthusiastic and passionate young people who are members of the SIFE community. Quoting from their website:

Working with leading corporate partners and member universities, SIFE establishes student programs on campuses around the world. With the support and encouragement of their faculty advisors and a local business advisory board, SIFE students apply business concepts to develop community outreach projects that improve the quality of life and standard of living for people in need.

SIFE teams’ projects address a variety of topics, such as market economics, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, personal success skills, environmental sustainability and business ethics. Rather than mandating a uniform set of projects, teams are encouraged to work within the framework of these topics while adapting their approach to the diverse needs of people in different communities. The result is a program that is global in scope and purpose with the flexibility and responsiveness of a community-based organization.

Being a sort of a volunteer in this organisation, a representative of the bank sponsoring quite a lot of their work. Hence, I go about the various universities in the world speaking to the students, assisting and guiding them on their projects and generally being a pain in the patootie. I also assist in the judging of competitions and stuff.

The students were really good. I found their eyes alight with enthusiasm. Here’s what the SIFE website says:

SIFE provides university students with the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to their communities while also discovering their potential to achieve an even greater impact as the business leaders of tomorrow. It’s this balance between immediacy of results and the continual development of effective, responsible leaders that defines the SIFE program and is essential to creating truly sustainable change.

By using the business concepts they are learning in the classroom to help others, SIFE students develop stronger business and leadership skills, as well as a sense of service and responsibility to the community and world around them. They’re emerging as leaders who understand the opportunity for business to make a positive economic, social and environmental impact. It’s the reason so many top companies have identified SIFE as a leading source of socially responsible business talent.

And yes, I saw these students. You know what? I find that seeing them fills me with hope for the future. They were smart, enthusiastic, dedicated and have been doing this for the past so many years, passing the torch from student to student, always being engaged and really making a difference to the common person down in society. I met them and listened to their competition presentation, which had some very interesting initiatives. I gave them some hints on how to improve the initiatives and how to better give the presentations. However, what was more important was the initiatives that they are doing. I am liberally borrowing from their presentations with due apologies :)

It's not like that the student were from business studies, but gratifyingly, I saw students from a variety of disciplines, such as management, French, German, International Relations, Strategy, Politics, English language, and international business. A good smattering of subjects.

The first initiative was to work with The Children's Hospital to see,

“How can we motivate these children to become environmentally aware, whilst giving them the courage to succeed in the business world?”

These students are working with the kids to reduce, recycle and reuse. The next initiative is

“How can we encourage young people to learn more about how businesses trade on an international scale, if they have no prior knowledge of the subject? “

Look at the progress they made in terms of understanding complex concepts after the students got engaged with the children?

The next initiative was:

How can we expect disadvantaged young people to survive in an increasingly competitive environment without the essential skills?

Disadvantaged sounds like such a simple non-threatening word, no? But these students are working with Children in Care, children whose family lives have been shattered, completely spoilt by their parents, who are either drug addicts or in prison for sexual assault or what have you. Then we also have the homeless young people, who have run away from home to escape from abusive parents or those who have simply fallen through the cracks. And finally they work with youth offenders, children who have started engaging in criminal activities or have been sentenced to jail terms. How do you fix these issues? These university students are actually doing something about them. They are giving them training and sacrificing valuable time of their own so that they can do some productive work.

They started small, with only 22 young people who had 23 sessions spread over 6 weeks. They learnt about bank accounts, budgeting and budgets and interest rates. Each one of them went through guidance on how to write a CV and cover letters and practiced with mock interviews. And 3 were actually invited to a real interview for a job. Not much, you might think, but I believe that this is a huge improvement. That’s civil society in operation and each took one of them away at least something in terms of knowledge gained.

The next initiative was

With a fall in graduate jobs how can we give graduates another route to success?

They invited 300 graduates and worked with various local firms and banks to arrange for entrepreneurship training and opportunities. Jobs are disappearing these days, but that doesn't mean that the graduates should do nothing. Thankfully the firms assisted in pushing the graduates to think about working through opportunities to start their own business.

But what impressed me most was that these students actually asked a basic question:

How can we expect our projects to have a significant impact without ensuring our own sustainability?

This is crucial! Public service does not mean sucking on government largesse, but should be self sustainable. So the students themselves actually arranged for ticketed events (a gruesome hideous jelly bath event. A picture is shown above.) They are also seeking sponsorships from firms to make sure that their work and funding is sustainable. Very creditable indeed.

I was reminded of Swami Vivekananda’s speech on the wonderful world of youth and I am taking the liberty to quote segments of it:

Supreme value of youth period is incalculable and indescribable. Youth life is the most precious life. Youth is the best time. The way in which you utilize this period will decide the nature of coming years that lie ahead of you. Your happiness, your success, your honour and your good name all depend upon the way in which you live now, in this present period. Remember this. This wonderful period of the first state of your life is related to you as the soft wet clay in the hands of the potter. Skilfully the potter gives it the right and correct shapes and forms, which he intends to give. Even so, you can wisely mould your life, your character, your physical health and strength, in short your entire nature in any way in which you make up your mind to do. And you must do this now.

O fortunate youth, recognize this great duty. Feel this wonderful privilege. Take up this adventure. God watches you graciously, ever ready to help and guide. I wish you to be great. The world has put its faith in you. Your elders keep their hopes in you. Now youth means to place your firm confidence in yourself and exercise your hopeful determination and resolution and willing good intentions in this beautiful task of self-culture. This will truly bring supreme satisfaction and fulfilment not only to you, but also to all concerned. The shaping of your life is indeed in your own hands.

To imagine that a whole host of these teams across the world are working towards similar goals makes me feel alive. What a wonderful collaboration of students helping others! When I saw the enthusiasm and motivation of these young folks, I was humbled and I can only wish them the best.

Technorati Tags: Charity,Universities,SIFE

An angel comes to town

2009-03-22T00:59:00.001-07:00

People see me coming and then hide from me. I am now turning into a giant bore for people who can assist in getting money or equipment for the charity. But does that stop me? Of course not, BD keeps on barrelling ahead with people despite them being totally so not interested.

It is not easy to get hold of equipment as I have alluded before, but I was at a corporate dinner and bumped into a friend who was previously the CTO of a very large universal bank. She gave birth to a lovely little baby and then has now rejoined the bank as their head of strategy and planning.

She was quite interested in the story and gave me the name of their hardware provider. This hardware provider takes care of the disposal of their assets. I met the lady concerned from their hardware provider and it became very clear that they have other commercial angles to this. She asked me if there was a chance of me getting them a contact at my bank, some sort of quid pro quo for her, so that if i get her some business then she can see if some equipment can be shaken loose. Needless to say, and I know pride is a bad thing in charity, I walked away. Not interested.

I thought that was the end of the story and gave it up as a learning experience. But to my surprise, my friend called me up out of the blue and said, I have 30 PC’s and laptops for you. I was near over the moon.

I think I have mentioned before how the recession is meaning that more and more children across the country are unable to afford PC’s and laptops, more and more children are falling ill. So Pat is constantly bombarded by requests for equipment and the pressure is going up and up. It is so tough to even talk to these students, teachers and hospitals. I dont know how Pat does it, really.

30 computers means that we will be able to help 30 students, 30 children who otherwise might not have been able to study, to work, to learn about Egypt or Greece, to understand algebra or check out the football scores online or create their websites or mash utilities. Makes me happy that few more bits of knowledge are being created in this world and few more smiles are going to come because an angel in the bank decided to help in getting these computers to the charity.

I know she does not want me to use her name, but all I can say again is, THANK YOU.

Disabled children wait up to two years for wheelchairs

2009-03-06T22:43:00.001-08:00

You know I keep on moaning about the fact that the ways of meeting children’s needs here in this country are strange? We are doing something for our long term sick children’s education by providing them by computers but i suppose you can say that that’s sort of optional.

But how about children who are unable to walk and need a wheelchair? If we have a fully funded NHS, surely they should be getting a wheelchair immediately? Well, no, unfortunately no. Read this and weep. I quote:

The NHS was told today to stop relying on charities to fill funding gaps after figures revealed many trusts would not pay the full cost of electric wheelchairs for disabled children.

Why on earth is this situation allowed to happen? Why aren't they given a wheelchair immediately? This is mental child abuse. And then not only people have to pay their taxes, but also give charity? Talk about being inefficient.

Statistics from 54% of NHS trusts in England and Scotland revealed that disabled children in England are forced to wait five months on average for a wheelchair.

5 months. Can you imagine? If you aren't disabled, think about this, you are forced to wait for 5 months for shoes. You dont have shoes. You cannot just go and buy them but are waiting to get them. Not for 1 day, not 2 days nor wait till the weekend so that you can purchase it, but for 5 months, 20 weeks, 140 days. 140 days without any shoes. Can you imagine what that will do to your feet? Now think about the poor disabled child. 5 months without a wheelchair.

The worst performing primary care trust (PCT), East Lancashire, in the north-west of England, had an average wait of two years for an electric wheelchair.

5 months was average across the country, but this area had an average wait of TWO years. And if you think that manual wheelchairs are possible, remember we are talking about children who are unable to control their muscles, so they cannot literally move about without assistance. Electric wheelchairs allow them to do so. And this is average 2 years, means 50% of the children in that area would have spent much more than 2 years waiting for an electric wheelchair.

The survey showed 58% of children in England had to wait at least three months for an electric wheelchair and 14% waited more than six months.

It gets worse. We are indeed a 3rd world country if this is how we treat our children in need. And then apparently we have sunk tons of money into the NHS.

Overall, 50% of the PCTs that responded said they did not fund the full cost of a powered wheelchair for a disabled child. Westminster PCT made an average contribution of only £700 towards the cost of a child's powered wheelchair, it said. Almost all PCTs contacted by the charity said the cost of a wheelchair was around £2,000 but in fact the true cost of a basic electric wheelchair would be around £3,000.

Holy crap. And rest of the money comes from charity, eh? typical.

A separate patient survey of 237 children found one in three did not receive any funding at all for their wheelchair.

And 1/3rd of the children dont receive any help whatsoever. Wonderful, you silly twits in the government. Do something!, get off your fat backsides and give this money to the kids. Or else, we will take the money for your shoes and give it to the kids. I bet that then the money will be found very quickly, no? And then when you read something like this, you feel so sad. I quote:

Family doctors are failing to provide improved services for patients, despite being paid tens of millions of pounds to do so, a report claims.

Technorati Tags: Children,Charity,United Kingdom

Fake Charities and Real Charities

2009-03-02T12:49:00.001-08:00

We are working on the technology for long term sick and disabled children charity on a shoe-string. There is a bunch of about 50 odd people, part and full time, who are working on a shoe string salary and mostly free. We have to force our CEO to take a miniscule salary. But we manage to keep on going and have managed to get more than 5000 pieces of technology to individual children over the past so many years.

What does that mean? It means that we are actually improving disused pieces of equipment, saving companies money which would have gone to recycling the equipment. This improvement is done by long term unemployed kids who have been in trouble with the law or long term unemployed or what have you and they get training on PC repair and maintenance. The equipment goes to the hospital schools, or special needs teachers or kids who are at home on long term illness cover. We are struggling every year to get pc’s and laptops. Laptops specially are important as the kids cannot use big pc’s when they are bed-ridden.

While government departments offer us with equipment which we actually take away, refurbish and recycle on our costs (we actually save taxpayer money), we do not get any assistance from the government in terms of equipment or funding. And in these days/times of recession, it has further dried up. So it was a a joy to love and behold when I read that there are fake charities out there which are hitting the existing charities hard.

What do they do? take a look at these charities and their background:

Alcohol Concern—an anti-drinking lobby group that receives less than 1% of its income from public donations
Campaign for Better Transport Charitable Trust—strong opponents of road building. Funded by the Department of Transport
Christian Aid—anti-free marketeers, campaigning for "justice on climate change and tax" on your pennies.
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)—the original fake charity, formed by the government in 1971. It receives just 2% of its funding from public donations.

And then there are many more. What really gets me going are two things. (1) why on earth are taxpayers monies being paid to these charities? (2) what’s the point of the government giving charities money to lobby the government? Can somebody explain this?

Well, seems like this blogsite tried to explain this. Just read the article, you will find the amount of hypocrisy and stonewalling gobsmacking. One wonders what these people are doing? How can they do it? By taking monies away from legitimate charities and misallocating public monies, the government is actually stealing twice.

I agree, any charity which accepts government funding is fake. Period. The situation is much more horrible, take a look at this proposal. The proposal is good, but Barnardo’s (78% state funded); NCH (88%); and Leonard Cheshire (88%) are pokes in your eyes. One weeps, on seriously weeps at the tremendous waste of resources done by this government and the fake charities, the scabby leeches on the body of the state.

Technorati Tags: Charity

update on the 12 laptops

2008-07-05T02:17:00.001-07:00

Well, actually there are not 10 but 12 laptops, and those laptops are going to go to 3 hospitals who have bone marrow transplant units. Kids in this situation can end up with more than an year away from other friends, schooling etc. etc. If things work out, these 12 laptops would have helped at least 30-40 kids over the next 2-3 years.

That's 40 man years of happiness that these two wonderful men at the local council managed to do. Can you imagine that statistic? Even if you consider it to be just 10%, that's 4 years even. 4 years of happiness to a sick child. That's so impressive and creditable. God will indeed reward them and in any case, life has a way of thanking people who help others.

God bless you both. Thank you again.

And things start moving

2008-06-29T02:05:00.001-07:00

FINALLY, with the grace of God, a local authority has been so kind as to offer 10 laptops for the kids.

I thought it would be easy, just call up the CIO or talk to them, get things moving and after few weeks, laptops and pc's will come pouring down. Well, that's the idea, but did not work that easily.

Asset disposal is a giant mess in most companies, while you are very careful in ordering stuff, to dispose stuff is horribly difficult. And people do not think through the logistics. Let me give you some examples, first by taking the example of a laptop and second via the example of a mobile phone.

You get a mobile phone from the company and then after 2 years, you lose it. So you order a new one and a spanking new one appears on your desk, you drool over it and so on and so forth. After 2 weeks, you find the old mobile phone nestling inside the umbrella stand where you dropped it when bending over it. This is the problem, what do you do with it? if you take 100 people in this situation, 90 will simply chuck it into a drawer at home and forget about it, 5 will give it to their children or wives, 5 will bring it back into the office and ask what happens with old kit. 99 times out of 100, there is no mechanism for actually accepting old mobile kit within companies.

Full asset refresh is a different matter. I kitted out the whole floor with 1000 pc's, so after 2 years, I refresh the entire lot, so the entire lot gets disposed off properly and I can sell off the old piles. But when you are talking about 1-2 old kit, once in a while, they will be left to collect dust and mould in your secretary's desk, underneath some desks, inside some cupboards, or what have you.

It is just too expensive to worry about 1-2 pieces of kit and most people just do not return kit. We ran a scheme that if you returned your own mobile in these large charity containers, we can recycle it and then buy goats in Ghana or something. Guess what happened? very few old mobile phones came through, and even those which did, were actually picked up by other employees whose current mobile phone was of an older generation than the disposed one.

So between laziness, difficulty in collection, no proper disposal policy and so on and so forth, collecting laptops for the charity is very difficult. Even if somebody at the top was willing to help out, the huge amount of work required to go after changing the policy neatly defeats the entire exercise. I personally failed to do so at the last bank I worked in. I was going down the wrong way by going for the top and asking for donations.

So what I am trying to do is to play the same game. Try to hook into the asset refresh cycle. Some laptops will be handed back to the ordering desk, and if we can hook into those few returned laptops, then we are in business. And then the van can come down from Nottingham on a regular basis and collect them.

This means that I have to press the flesh of many many senior people and network widely. And so many people say yes and well, not much happens. Nothing wrong with that, these things happen, people are busy, but its tough on everybody, raise expectations, expend energy and then fail. I am currently running at about 20 contacts to 5 actual asset conversations to now the first actual delivery. So I think I am doing ok...

But every now and then, and this is for the first time, that we have managed to get 10 laptops freed from a London council. I am very grateful to the gentleman concerned, his asset manager and the young lady who made the introductions.

Here is a photograph of a very kind gentleman who donated a laptop he won to a long term ill child.

My first visit to Disha

2008-06-28T02:57:00.001-07:00

I wrote earlier about a small charity that I got involved with some months back. Finally managed to get myself to Bhopal to see it. The full essay is on the main site.

these are girls from the local basti who come in to the centre to learn about the 3 R's

here are the actual boys

the teacher stands behind the boys, these 5 boys are singing a welcome song for us.

this standing boy cannot speak Hindi, a language which nobody understands...

they know their letters and numbers..

there was almost a fight over who gets to do this...

this is the boy who was giving the radio commentary

they are reciting the sanskrit shloks which they recite before every meal.

listening raptly

here are the cupboards

digging into his locker

very nicely arranged, the little that they have. It is well arranged. wallpapered with old newspapers. 2 sections, they also have put up photographs of film actresses. the only little place they can call their very own.

my home, and that's the curtain.

the main room

the boy and his drum

the kids off for lunch

sitting in disciplined rows for their food.

this is where they sleep

the courtyard

the bathrooms

the toilets

the washing

getting served

good wholesome food being served. They don't start eating till everybody has been served. Very disciplined, very impressed.

Here is the full slide show if you are interested in seeing it.

Technorati Tags: Charity,India

The journey begins

2008-06-13T22:48:00.001-07:00

It was October 2007 that I was introduced to Pat Ryan, who runs a charity called as Express Linkup IT. She is an amazing lady. Very few people actually have my full and utter respect but this lady is one of them. What she has been doing for the past so many years with so little money or support for so many people is absolutely amazing.

I am reminded of Winston Churchill's quote at the time of the world war II, this is what he said,

The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day…

At that time, it was for fighter pilots, but this time, it is for wonderful women like Pat Ryan, who have silently and quietly helped hundreds of thousands of children. She literally wowed the heart out of me.

And it resonated with me. We are talking about kids who are long term ill.
These kids do not get any educational technology to cheer their minds up.
Keep the mind engaged and the body lives longer. This is the problem, the kids are ill, go into the hospital and do what? they fall behind their studies, their minds are not engaged, you cant just stick a book at them, the current kids are growing up with a whole world in front of them in the form of the internet. So these children are given laptops or home pc's which they are using to study, to develop their minds, their hearts and bodies are engaged. (a disguised photograph of one of the children helped with a laptop and printer from the charity, just look at how her eyes are hungrily looking at the laptop, brings tears to your eyes, I tell you)

Many moons back, I was long term ill as well, flat on my back for months on end, literally months. And that's in India where patient care is, well, interesting. Once you have lain there in the same bloody bed, looking at the same people who you just associate with pain and hurt, staring at the peeling white painted wall, when you have started naming each paint crack and curl out of sheer boredom, you desire some kind of intellectual stimulation.. And you can only flirt so much with those poxy harridans who clean the wards.

So I joined the charity as a trustee. To help out. A lovely bunch of people in the charity even. It became clear that the demand side of the equation was very high, we could end up having more than 100 children being long term ill per day. It was the supply side which was the issue and in the next few post, will talk more about that journey. Since I also dabble around in writing for magazines and stuff, I get to know about people who are in the media field and will also talk about my attempts to get some media contact going. I will also talk about how I am seeing the charity sector going. For what its worth, I have been invited to join the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and hope to see what I can do for this charity via that channel.

Introduction to Express Link-Up

2008-05-01T14:54:00.001-07:00

Over the past 4 months, I have been involved with a small charity, Express Link Up which helps to bring technology to hospitalised children. And it has soon become my passion. I decided to write this blog on an infrequent basis to talk about the challenges, joys, love, pain, frustration one feels when one gets involved in this kind of stuff. So do bear with me if I get too emotional...