Posts Tagged ‘charity’

On Monday, the Humanist Action Group of Leeds completed it’s holiday food drive. Having spent the previous two weeks collecting food and donations to put together food parcels for local homeless shelters, the group spend the night bringing together all the food and packaging it up.

In total the group managed 24 boxes, most of which had to be duct taped shut due to them overflowing. The lesson for next time – we need bigger boxes!

On Thursday we ran a special session of our homeless outreach work specifically designed to introduce new people. Turn out was great and we would like to say a big thank you to everyone who came down and gave up their evening to help out.

On Tuesday Leeds Atheist Society held a charity quiz night to raise money for WaterAid.

WaterAid is a charity dedicated to bringing clean water and good sanitation to everyone and as everyone at the society is a big fan of having both clean water and good sanitation it seemed an excellent charity to support.

We held another charity quiz night at A-Soc last Tuesday. Unfortunately there was a lack of turn out but those that did brave the cold all enjoyed themselves and a vast array of raffle prizes resulted in a lot of winners – some people even winning twice! Most importantly of course, my team took home the win for the quiz and by quite a long way too . Even more impressive for the rest of the team when you find out that Nicola, who claims to be doing a biology degree, couldn’t answer any of the biology questions 😀 .

In a very drunken state on New Year’s Eve I got up and announced to my good friends attending the bash that this year was going to be the year of the Chris Worfolk Foundation.

And I mean it.

As such the foundation is officially making 2010 the year which we make a name for ourselves. We have some very exciting projects on the way which we will be announcing soon alongside the exciting projects that we are already working on.

I find the current climate an incredibly interesting one, interest in making a difference in the world has never been higher, people are really passionate about improving quality of life. With the right opportunities being provided this can be put to work to do tremendous good and I fully believe we have the experience, the skills, the drive and the ambition to achieve this.

We’re already on our way building better links in the community. Next week Leeds Skeptics will be celebrating its first birthday and in February our first humanist community will launch – I can’t express how excited I am about opportunities such as these to bring people together in the spirit of celebrating shared human experiences.

Later this year we will be doing this on a larger scale and will expand our activities to other regions as well as continuing to drive forward with new projects, form stronger links with other organisations and inspire more people to get involved and make a difference.

2010 will be a year to remember. I hope you will join us on the journey.

Best regards,
Chris
Trustee, Chris Worfolk Foundation

This evening A-Soc held a fundraiser for Amnesty International. It was reasonably successful – we got around 30 people there and raised over £100, the winning idea of the night being the raffle to which Jonni had secured us some amazing prizes – including tickets to the Four Nations final which I walked away with! I understand it is some kind of sporting event, I will ask the guys at work to explain more tomorrow.

Rich having become increasingly flustrated with the lack of action in Humanist communities suggested that we should really be getting out there and doing good work and leading by example. As such, last Thursday (the 12th) we headed out to feed the homeless.

It was an interesting experience. We took soup and coffee which went down reasonably well although most of them weren’t overly interested in the soup, they just wanted the coffee. It’s also suprising how few of them there actually are on the streets.

Interestingly enough though there isn’t that much support in Leeds. There is one shelter, St. George’s Crypt but that is basically all there is. Maybe it’s just not that much of a problem but it was certainly nice to be able to provide those that were out with a hot drink.