Just over a year ago a group of Year 10s who were participating in the CAFOD Young Volunteer Programme came up with a unique and ingenious idea for a fundraiser. It’s very easy for us all to be tempted to fall back on MUFTI days and Cake Sales, but not this group of enthusiastic young people. They came up with an ‘escape room’ idea that combined the challenges and games associated with escape rooms, with the theme of their fundraising and awareness campaign for CAFOD World Gifts. Such was the excitement around school to participate with friends and top the leaderboard, our young volunteers gave up over a month of consecutive lunch times to lead the fun. They raised plenty of funds to buy ‘birth certificate’ gifts in countries where the basic identity document we know isn’t given out to the poorest. However, the real winner was how their activity managed to educate students form across the school through a mixture of fun and challenge.
After hearing about what our young volunteers came up with, CAFOD got in touch to praise our students and ask if they could develop a resource based on our idea. They subsequently came and met with our group and myself to listen to how we came up with it all and developed it into a successful campaign. CAFOD then filmed our students leading a group of participants and interviewed them. We are delighted to have just heard that CAFOD did use our game as a model for a new resource and it’s just been released.
We are incredibly proud of the thought and passion put in by our young people, who were so committed to change and social justice. Congratulations to Nicole, Hayden, Alice, Kaylum, Atticus, Peter, Nathan and Ewan.
