Fundraising for Egypt

It’s a cold grey Friday afternoon in January and Jen has just lost the circulation in two of her fingers, not to worry - she still has one good hand to dish out cakes and take in money.

The main doors to the Graham Kerr building are familiar territory for any expedition fundraiser, it’s hard to pass through without spotting a table laden with home baking and the smiley faces (or not) of expedition members peddling their wares.

Bake-sales are the bread and butter of expedition fundraising and serve the purpose of both making money and giving members the opportunity to enthuse to students and staff about their expedition and intended research, however raising enough money to fund an expedition from bake-sales alone is never going to happen no matter how good your carrot cake may be.

Everyone loves a pub quiz especially an expedition pub quiz and ours was no different. We were lucky to have an excellent turn out on the night and it went without a hitch, even though half our team were away sunning themselves in Egypt pretending to do work. Trying to find raffle prizes on the day of the quiz is never advised but what the prizes may have lacked in monetary value was certainly compensated for by comedy value. A particular highlight had to be Michael winning his own used candle, serves the cheapskate right.

At the end of November we hosted a club night in Flat 0/1, I pulled in several favours which saw us get the venue and DJ’s (myself included) for next to nothing. All we had to do now was get people down on the night, teaming up with the Peru Expedition pub quiz proved to be mutually beneficial with people who were just going to be at the club night pre drinking at the quiz and vice versa. A special mention should be made for Emily and her renegade PR techniques which fell nothing short of grabbing random folk on the street in a headlock and dragging them round. For a cold wet night in November the night was a great success and we have been invited back in the spring.

We have a number of events planned over the coming months with more bake-sales, an anti-valentines pub quiz and another club night and band night in the pipeline.

As well as raising money as a group we will be also be flying solo with a range of fundraising ideas, from tough mudder and munro bagging to learning to ride a bike we will be pushing ourselves to the limit earning every penny donated in blood sweat and tears.

So why are we putting ourselves through this? It’s a no brainer really a little bit of effort now will pay massive dividends in the summer when we are spending six weeks in Egypt diving in the Red Sea and carrying out important scientific research. Opportunities like this don’t come along every day and we are all very lucky and equally excited to be in the position we are in.

Guy x