A New Direction

Today’s guest post is from Kirsty, who describes herself as a thirty-something wife and mother of one cheeky toddler. She blogs at damsonlane.com, and you can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.  

Restraint does not come easily to me. I have a major character flaw that means I often say aloud things that probably should remain unsaid. Recently I seem to be better at biting my tongue but in all honesty this is due to my post-baby lack of confidence, general exhaustion and a feeling that there are more important things in life, rather than a deliberate mission to behave myself.

In the last few weeks I have started to feel more like the younger, feistier me but my perspective has changed. I’ve found myself in situations where I would previously have got up on my soap box but instead I have consciously decided to take a deep breath and walk away. The younger me would think I’ve gone soft, that I am a push over and that I have no sense of social responsibility but my younger self never stopped to think that her outbursts were actually impetuous outrages which didn’t achieve anything other than making the individuals involved feel under verbal attack (but don’t tell my younger self that, she’d be really pissed off). Continue reading

Arts Emergency

Today’s guest post is from a small charity which I support called Arts Emergency. It was set up by the comedian Josie Long, and fundraiser Neil Griffiths, and I’m thrilled to give them the opportunity to explain a bit more about what they do and why. As well as all the info that’s on the website, you can keep up to date with their work on Twitter

Arts Emergency logo

The Arts Emergency: a generation of young people are being incentivised to disengage from humanistic study. Don’t stand for it.

It seems education as a whole is increasingly building for short term profit, and the skills we now champion are those that aid this through business and industry.

As we now know, in reality this has meant that academic disciplines caricatured as having no clear economic utility have had their public funding withdrawn entirely.

Yet those very subjects – the arts, the humanities and the social sciences in particular, are unquestionably vital to a diverse economy (the creative industries alone constitute nearly 10% of all enterprises in the UK, not to mention the fact more jobs than ever before require degree level qualifications to enter). Even seen through the relatively narrow ideological prism of those depreciating these skills and curiosities (of vital human importance) – it seems at best a counterintuitive act, at worst an act of deliberately gross cultural and social vandalism. Remember too we are suffering cuts in schools for music, and the closure of public libraries. Continue reading

Biking for Babies

So, can I introduce myself? I’m the Reverend Dougie Burnett, a minister with the United Reformed Church in Bristol. Next April with my two daughters, Isabella and Lucy, I shall be taking on the London to Paris bike ride for the charity PiggyBankKids.  This is in the way of seeking monies for our fundraising (we have pledged to raise £4500 between the three of us), but also to espouse the work of a very worthwhile charity.

Triathlon

If you’re a regular reader of DorkyMum you might have come across PiggyBankKids already. Remember the loose coins collection of a couple of months ago? OK, so we are talking the same charity. PiggyBankKids is all about changing children’s lives. Founded in 2002 by Sarah Brown it seeks to inspire professionals to continue their world-changing work in saving and transforming lives. This takes different shapes and forms in this country and around the world. First up is the Jennifer Brown Research Laboratory, based at the prestigious Queen’s Medical Research Institute in Edinburgh and is uniquely focused on both pregnancy and neonatal research. Next there are the partnership projects. From mentoring programmes to sports provision, children’s cancer care to school-based projects it is all there, with a particular focus on mentoring. Finally there is education for all. PiggyBankKids is expanding, taking their commitment to the most vulnerable children outside of the UK and into a global context. We have chosen to focus on the second of the Millenium Development Goals, set in 2000, in which the global community committed to universary primary education by 2015. Continue reading

Bloggers and Charities

Edinburgh poster art

I have seen quite a bit of grumbling recently from bloggers about the volume of charity requests that are dropping into their inboxes. I can only imagine that in the run up to Christmas such requests will become even more frequent.

To be honest, I don’t mind emails from charities too much myself because I have a fairly strict system for dealing with them.

I give the majority of my support to two charities – one big one (Save the Children) and one small one (PiggyBankKids) – and they are the only ones I’ll write about in any detail on the blog.
Continue reading