Make Poverty History

Around Christmas 2004 the Standard Grade Modern Studies class began a ‘Make poverty history’ campaign. Led by our former teacher Mr. Seaton, we began to raise awareness. We started by looking into the political issues causing poverty and starvation in Sudan. So as the holidays were on everybody’s minds we started by singing; ‘Band Aid’ the popular chart number raising great amounts of money to be sent away to Africa.

Our second effort was based on the idea of creating awareness. We worked as a year group of Modern Studies students to make displays, stalls, posters, and to project images onto the walls that would catch the attention and grab the hearts of our peers and teachers, hoping that it would encourage our fundraiser. We designed two badges that we aimed to sell to as many like minded human beings on our campus as possible. We spent around two weeks placing ourselves around the school trying to persuade our fellow students to take a moment out of their day and consider the lives of others in virtually another world…a mass of people who are hopeless without our help.

During this awareness campaign we raised around £400 in order to ‘Make Poverty History’.

Our third endeavour was something we refer to as ‘buddies’. We were given the opportunity to raise awareness again and chose to do just that. We made thousands of cut out cardboard silhouettes shaped as children. We had as many people as possible involved- cutting out buddies and colouring them in, making each one another strong reminder of every child in Africa. We wanted these buddies to make a statement – each buddy would represent another starving child. We then packaged them up and sent them to the Prime Minister. We were determined to make an impact on the Government; letting them see how many people care that they did something about poverty, and the sooner the better. We wanted to make a difference. This seemed the ideal time because of the impending G8 Summit in Gleneagles.