Tag Archives: volunteer

Charity Chic in Downley, High Wycombe

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Iain Rennie Hospice at Home service, provided by Rennie Grove Hospice Care, offers essential palliative and end-of-life care based around patients and their families, both day and night.

Charity Chic in Downley, High Wycombe

I know several people whose relatives have been nursed by these exemplary nurses and carers, nursed at home which is the wonderful concept of this charity.

One of their main fundraising arms is the charity shop. The Iain Rennie Hospice shop in Downley High Wycombe is just one of many. Downley is a village with a fantastic sense of community and a great deal going on, and is perched on the top of a hill to the west of High Wycombe, with a five minute walk to the Chiltern woods one side, and a twenty minute walk into town on the other.

Charity Chic in Downley, High Wycombe shopwindow

Mandy Dowling runs the shop with the help of invaluable volunteers and Mandy’s award winning window dressing is a lesson to us all.

 

Inside is an Aladdin’s cave of Charity Chic, all donated, so that Mandy is never sure what will be brought in, which is part of the fun of working in a charity shop.

 

I found amongst many other ‘buys’ a pair of shoes, New Look. £5.00. Just the thing for clubbing. Slightly out of my age range, but only slightly, I say, hopefully.

 

More appropriate perhaps is the Laura Ashley Jacket for £5.00.

 

Charity Chic in Downley, High Wycombe lauraashley

I found two beautiful slender white vases for £2.00 each and photographed them beside a neat black bowl with white dots. Sophisticated with clean lines. Mandy and I put them on top of a glass fronted cabinet that had been sold to someone who is going to upcyle it, in a distressed style. It was only £20 and I can’t believe I missed it.

Charity Chic in Downley, High Wycombe twovases

Candle holders are my ‘thing’. These are often brought into the shop but these I left for someone else. I have no more room, and Dick would leave home if they came through the door. These are new, and priced at £4.00 each.

Charity Chic in Downley, High Wycombe candleholder

Christmas is coming and the shop is festive, with most of the decorations and Christmas bric a brac for sale. I found these little ‘friends’.

Smiley Face is £1.00, the glamour-puss bear is £2.00 and the book, The First Snow of Winter by Graham Ralph is a snip at 50p. (lovely book. I read it while I was standing there)

Charity Chic in Downley, High Wycombe childrensgifts

Over the last few weeks, Mandy and her staff have been snaffling up cafetieres for the Words for the Wounded LitFest Day on 18th April. Look at my haul thus far. Priced at £3.00 each.

Charity Chic in Downley, High Wycombe cafetieries

And yes, there are those magical moments you hear about on Antiques Roadshow. Mandy tells me of a dusty old painting that came into the shop and which could have slipped through their hands. But a bit of a rub (much like the gennii’s lamp) and a name appeared – Victoria Crowe who Mandy googled. It sold on ebay for £500.

 

To make a donation to Rennie Grove Hospice Care: www.renniegrove.org/donate or to volunteer www.renniegrove.org/volunteer

For further information: www.renniegrove.org/standards 

 

There are so many more Aladdin’s Caves out there, doing good whichever way you look. The customers get a fabulous deal, and hours of fun browsing, and the charity gain much needed money. Contact us with tales of your favourite charity shops/stalls and the buys that have brought you pleasure. Contact margaret@margaret-graham.com

 

 

 

‘Do Good, Get Good’.

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Coldplay and Noel Gallagher have already signed up to the new currency at www.bluedotworld.com, which gives fans access to live shows and exclusive material by artists, authors and movie stars in return for donations, volunteer work and media sharing.

Blue Dot is the new social currency given to people who do good things for their favourite charities by sharing on social media websites, volunteering and donating to any one of the 100k non-profit organisations globally. The idea also influences young people to get involved with charities, as a recent survey conducted by SAGA showed that people over the age of 75 are the most likely generation to give to charity… yet Blue Dot is hoping to overturn these figures by rewarding youngsters with amazing prizes for ‘doing good’.

Within moments of the site going live, Noel Gallagher offered last chance tickets to his debut UK dates exclusively to Blue Dot citizens. Within 48hrs, thousands of positive actions had been taken for causes, including cash donations to over 70 UK different charities. Coldplay also used Blue Dot in the UK and US, to offer the chance to see them live exclusively to fans of Blue Dot.

Blue Dot is rapidly claiming recognition and credibility… founder of Blue Dot, Chris Ward, filmed exclusive backstage footage for Blue Dot with artists at BBC’s Children in Need, including with Ed Sheeran, Rizzle Kicks, Coldplay, JLS, One Direction, Snow Patrol, The Saturdays, Elbow and James Morrison.

One Direction have commented: “We’re thrilled to be part of Blue Dot; It’s a brilliant concept and a great cause. We really hope that our exclusive dressing room acoustic performance of ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ encourages people to donate.”

Nichole Scherzinger, Professor Green, Katherine Jenkins, Rebecca Ferguson, Anton Du Beke and Joe McElderry are amongst others that have donated singed albums and tour tickets.

Blue Dot Founder, Chris Ward said: “I was previously Creative Director of the UK’s Comic Relief, where we work first hand with major stars and brands to create attention-grabbing moments that engage millions of people in volunteering and charitable giving.

I created Blue Dot, as a genuinely new & innovative way to enable every single Cause to create that same impact, every single day of the year.”

Life of a Super Sports Blogger

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—Independent bloggers drive sports industry—Fortune 500 companies engage with the citizen journalists —

It’s the ultimate dream for many a football fan. Swapping the nine to five for a career spent posting on a blog about the sport you adore. No editorial limits, no suit, no boss. For Alan Spurgeon and his blog Footy-Boots.com, that dream is reality.

What started as a series of niche articles in 2006, Alan’s blog which focuses primarily on reviews of football apparel now reaches four million people worldwide, three hundred thousand of whom read his words on average every other day. It’s the sort of platform any of the major football brands would pay serious sums to control, but Footy-Boots.com remains independent, relying upon a small team of mostly volunteer staff and freely available publishing technology to engage the fans.

In a year which has seen every major sports brand jump on the social media bandwagon, Alan’s seen a shift in attitude when it comes to dealing with the marketing departments representing the kit he reviews—

“Our job is to review everything we can get hold of and when a product comes with an already established online fan-base that can explain the benefits in our terms, an invitation to meet the people who produce the product and a willingness to engage in feedback, there’s an obvious advantage. For years we struggled away ordering products as soon as we could get hold of them, crawling through the maze of PR departments to get comment or information and then taking the stuff to the field to run it through the paces before posting our opinion online. These days it’s a little different. Whilst we’re still just a couple of lads operating from their laptop, it’s not unusual for us to be invited to meet the people who produce the kit or to go down to the pitch to chat to the premiership players who are wearing it. The biggest names in the world like Nike, adidas and Puma have got used to the fact that if you want to sell your boots to a digital generation, it’s not just the print media and broadcasters you need to engage with celebrity endorsement, it’s the little guys like us. We need data and it’s in their interests to make sure we have it.”

Whilst the manufacturers are falling over themselves to accommodate the ‘super-bloggers’, some team brands have been better than others at adjusting to the social media era. Manchester United and Arsenal rule Facebook with 20million and 7million fans respectively. Arsenal in particular have embraced the digital revolution, recently hosting web chats for up to 2.5million international fans at a time. The players themselves are thrust into this world, somewhat dazed, to play their part. In May this year Rio Ferdinand posted on Twitter “Yesterday I’m signing a few autographs + a guy pulls out his phone + says ‘can you follow me’! A follow is the new autograph!”.

So what does it feel like being taken from your backroom office to the glorious highs of sports stardom? According to Alan, whose site is successful enough to “pay the bills”, some things will never change. “We are now considered de facto I guess in our niche, particularly for the Football Boot Awards we run every year where the public come to us to vote for the product of the year. That’s great and it’s astonishing of course to get to meet your heroes through your work as we have done when premiership players are lined up to take part in things like the awards sessions, but other things remain the same. We’ve not yet been able to get to some of the international product launches, not because of the cost, but because we’re a simple set up, a couple of guys and a few computers, we just wouldn’t be able to take the time for a long flight which would mean being offline for 9 or 12 or 24 hours. We miss out on that sort of stuff. We’re still geeks attached to our umbilical tech.” When asked if they would accept a private flight sponsored by a major sports brand, their reaction is typical of the new generation of citizen journalists— “No way, the fans of the blog would slaughter us. Our greatest asset is being unbiased. You can’t buy our opinion.”

Nobody at Footy-Boots.com has made a dot com million, but the site owners need an income. The key to success might be seen in the addition of sponsors and affiliates on the boy’s website which help to bring in stable financial support whilst they focus on reviewing kit and steering conversation in the forums. “We’re not salesmen, we never have been, never could be. We’re not good at going out there to find sponsors. I’m sure there are plenty of ways the site could make more money, but it’s never been about the money for us so we’re happy to just let a couple of sports shops link through the site as long as we get positive feedback about them. It’s a happy compromise between running a basic blog and being a commercial website.”

As someone who has tested every major boot released since 2006, Alan has a few pointers for those wanting to be on the Christmas list this year and next. “The best boot in the world is only good for one man. Reading our forums (especially the “ask geeks” channel), you know every player has their own strength, speed, accuracy, strength, ability and confidence to take risks on the pitch. No one cleat is going to fit them all. Just like social media has opened up a million different varieties of opinion, the manufacturers of the product are going to have to follow too. Bespoke might be the way to go. I’m sure the technology will exist to let players pick every aspect of their kit through an app very soon.” Which raises an interesting question- what will be the value of celebrity if and when every boot is customised not to the famous foot, but to every man or women on the pitch? There will be bigwigs in PR breathing a sigh of relief in some cases— we all know Football and Twitter don’t always a happy marriage make. Alan has a list of social media disasters on his site to tell that story.

So where next for Alan and his happy team of sports bloggers? “2011 was a great year, we saw some astonishing products hit the pitch and through our relationships with the brands, we felt like we were pretty much front row. We’ll continue to offer a space where your opinion matters and we’ll be bringing that to a climax with this year’s awards which launch online December 5th and we’re expecting tens of thousands of votes again.”

The one difference between this year and last for Footy-Boots.com, a 1765% rise in the number of visits originating from mobile phones. Let’s hope that Nike and co have their iPhone apps in order when voting kicks in.