Help out Indian schools with a donation of books

One of my friends, Nilanjana Roy, invited me to this facebook group. The concept is simple, please put some money and a coordinator together, get about 100 books in various genres and then gift to a Indian government school. Brilliant idea, eh? Offered to help with some money and suggestions here. Early days yet, so lets see what happens. I am happy to take this out further. Quite exciting, eh? I think this can be a brilliant idea :) Please do consider joining into this and helping out this project if you can. Ma Saraswati will indeed bless you with 4 additional brains that will exist in a pocket dimension attached with an invisible wormhole in your left ear, you will be frightfully brilliant, handsome and people will admire your singing and the shape of your feet.

What are you waiting for? Go sign up to the facebook page. Incidentally, check out who has joined, some of the greatest and good of Indian society, eh? Another reason..

 

 

 

So what else has been happening in the charity space last week?

1. Had a nice little corporate dinner and earned about £450 for IT4CH as a honorarium.

2. Proposed some ideas for a sustainability competition at work, which included proposals for essay competitions, academic studies/paper competitions, funding for sustainable products, etc. Lets see where that goes.

3. Now that I am in transaction banking, I am trying to find out ways to get something green into the payments space. I can just see making good amount of dosh being green, so have couple of nice little meetings coming up.

4. Met up with a great chap from my old alma mater, Manchester Business School. Over the past few years, a new director has taken over and he has really shook up the place in a good way. Previously we had some bloody boring directors. but the new director is good. So we had some nice chats about things we can do with the firm and the school such as funded scholarships, joint research links, perhaps discounts for domestic students wanting to do an MBA, etc. etc. Lets see what happens, I have offered to mentor 3 students this year anyway…

The influence of a teacher stops at eternity

You might recall that we are trying to improve the financial literacy of British children by an investment trading game that we run for school children. One of the ways we are thinking about expanding the scope is by training teachers to do this rather than rely on the LSE SIFE team.

So one of the things that the firm sponsors is TeachFirst. This is an initiative which tries to bring teachers into challenged secondary schools in the UK. The charity assists in helping top graduated become excellent teachers. Not too many, 5-600 teachers per year and the idea is to make a small but significant difference. So we had a nice little meeting with them, along with the LSE SIFE team, we discussed ways of getting the trading game packaged up and then given to the teachers, we discussed ways of getting a competition going and again, funding for this wouldn't be a major issue.

Also spoke to our internal brokerage about seeing if they could support us, but lets see where that goes.

I am quite chuffed about this all, if we can get these 5-600 teachers yearly to use the trading game and push it out to the students, hey, big impact :) Very happy.