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Irish Times, 11th March 2009
Eugene Egan and his classmates in Blackrock College are selling
St Patrick's Day badges in aid of GOAL and Aidlink
I COULD HAVE kicked this straight off by gushing my emotions, or
with a soulful, ponderous line such as "every seven seconds,
a child dies from hunger", but instead, I'll tell you the tale
of a boy's Transition year project.
Well, I'm afraid that I am going to talk about charity. But not
the kind you'd expect. I am not building houses in Uganda, nor teaching
in an overcrowded, makeshift school in Calcutta.
You see, every year, my school, Blackrock College, runs a campaign
for the charities GOAL and Aidlink. We sell GOAL badges –
they're the shamrock badges with the word Goal stitched across them
that appear around St Patrick's Day – and every last penny
we raise from selling these badges is split evenly between Goal
and Aidlink.
This programme has been active in our school for 19 years now,
and in that time the school has raised just short of EUR2 million.
Two million euro. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we're that good. Hold
the applause, though, because there's something else that sets this
particular project apart from any other in Ireland: it's run by
the Transition Year students.
That's right, 15- and 16-year-olds are being put in charge of an
event that raises hundreds of thousands of euro, with no training.
Walking into the administration office is like a journey to a Neverland
of sorts, where the children are in charge, and the adults are looked
upon with disdain.
Who makes up our Neverland-esque family? The 200-odd students in
the year are divided into a few different teams. The direct sales
team, for instance, look after businesses, getting badges to companies
or shops. The Secondary Schools and Primary Schools teams reach
out to other educational institutions in the area, selling badges
to the pupils there. The overseas team sends badges all across the
world in the lead-up to St Patrick's Day.
And watching over it all are the administration team, sitting on
their thrones, nodding silently as their plans visibly come to fruition.
I am a member of the administration team. We're the students in
charge of keeping the rest of the students in line, through a carefully
devised system of controlled anarchy. We oversee every sale, all
the envelope-packing, and every feature of this expedition into
the world of charity. Our 'mission-control' room is alive (and sometimes
even frantic) with industry – we only have from the middle
of February to March 17th to sell up to 150,000 badges, so things
have to happen fast.
A thing I noticed that surprised me a bit, being part of the admin
group, was that there are very few "passengers" involved
in the project. No-one shrugs off a task. It seems that everyone
is incredibly motivated to do whatever they can. Contrary to the
popular stereotype, it seems that we Transition years are actually
doing work. And doing good work. Why? Probably because we all know
that each shamrock badge we sell could well be worth a week's supply
of food for the poorest of the poor.
I think the moral of this little story is that you don't need to
dig wells in Africa to do charitable deeds. Just buy a little green
badge for EUR2 (available in your local newsagent's now!)
© The Irish Times
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