No. 59: Sustainable Development Goals & our charity
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What better gift for your loved one this Valentine’s Day, than a unique, numbered, trackable SchoolBag in their name. By doing so, you’ll give a child somewhere in the world the tools they need for an education, too!
Simply click the link below, write a short, personal message you’d like to leave for the person who’ll receive the gift, and once we have the email address to send it to, they’ll receive an eGift Card (with your message in) letting them know about their special present. They then track their unique SchoolBag number via the ‘Track my Bag’ section you can see pop up on this website 🙂
Gift your SchoolBag to a loved one, here!
A SchoolBag is filled with stationery, eating utensils and most recently a hygiene kit. The stationery gives the more obvious tools to be able to do school work, and for many it’s the first time they’ve had a pencil to write with and paper to write on. Some children have nothing at all and have to memorise numbers and words – imagine just how difficult that would be. Alongside books for writing, drawing and maths, they also receive colouring pencils, biros, a ruler, a maths set with a compass, big rubber and pencil sharpener.
The water bottle means they can actually carry water with them (some children walk many miles to school, often in intense heat) and also a lunchbox to either take food to school, or to be able to have lunch at school (the first SchoolBags went to Swaziland, now known as Eswatini, where if the children didn’t have a plate or bowl, they were turned away from the lunch queue so would end up with no food – probably for the whole day as many were orphans). Our hygiene kits contain soap, a flannel, toothbrush, toothpaste and a face mask. It’s so important alongside education, children can keep themselves clean as well, and these simple items do just that.
All these contents, along with the all-important SchoolBag itself, comes to just £20 (and that includes getting it right to the child). If we can give a child the tools, they can then learn and grow – and who knows where it may take them. Today’s children are tomorrow’s leaders.
With the recent introduction of hygiene kits (flannel, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste) into our SchoolBags as an additional item alongside the stationery items and eating utensils, it became important to add a face mask too due to the current worldwide situation. You can read more about the inclusion of our hygiene kits in this Blog in a Bag from December 2020.
Even with the extra contents, we are still able to keep the cost of our bags at £20, which is a fantastic result for us. To enable us keep these costs down, we’re asking the sewists* amongst you if you’re able to help us out by making some face masks to put in our SchoolBags? Not only that, but the variety of masks in the SchoolBags will be such fun for the children! They can be any coloured material and elastic, but ideally we’d love you to follow our pattern so there’s continuity (plus we’ve tested them out on children of different ages and they’ve come up trumps).
The pattern (below) is in an easy-to-follow template with all the instructions you should need. Please make sure your seams are nice and strong, with a double stitch if necessary. We want them to last wear and washing for as long as possible, for the children using them.
Please share the pattern, and let us know if you’re making any. We’d love to hear from you!
Email us ([email protected]) if you have any questions about the pattern, or making the masks.
Please post your completed face masks to:
School in a Bag
Home Farm
Chilthorne Domer
Somerset
BA22 8RD
We look forward to receiving them, and of course putting them in our next consignment of UK-packed SchoolBags, ready to be shipped!
*Sewist – a blend of ‘sew’ and ‘artist’ as writing ‘sewer’ could be misconstrued, especially by Google‘s SEO and we’ll end up being placed alongside articles about drains, which we don’t want! We rather like this term 🙂
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We didn’t want to abandon our annual Boxing Day Walk this year, but with restrictions in place, we can’t do it our usual way. Therefore, we are running a virtual walk, meaning anyone can join us, from anywhere in the world – how exciting!
Our Boxing Day walk is a chance to remember Piers (our Founder & CEO’s brother), and all the others who also lost their lives in the Indian Ocean tsunami on Boxing Day 2004. It’s also a time to get out of the house and walk off your Christmas indulgences – as well as an opportunity to celebrate the year’s achievements of the charity.
Our normal walk is from our charity HQ in Chilthorne Domer nr Yeovil, to the beautiful National Trust property, Montacute House, and back (about 6 miles). It’s a chance to meet old friends and new, and maybe even have a sneaky tipple along the way! There’s no reason to change elements of this (we highly recommend the tipple!).
As this is usually a small fundraiser for us, we’re also asking that a donation of £10 is made per family/friend group to SIAB (obviously if you’re able to donate more, that would be amazing!)
1. Decide on a walk route (could be from your house, or a short drive away)
2. Depending on Tier structures where you live, you may be able to grab a couple more friends to join in!
3. Make your £10+ donation to School in a Bag here (please put in the notes that it’s for the Virtual Walk, so we can track it)
4. We always have a minute’s silence at 10.36am (the time the tsunami struck the island of Phi Phi where Luke and Piers were), so if you’d like to join in on that, it would be very special
5. Take photos and tag us in (Facebook * Instagram * Twitter) so we can join in and see your fun, too!