A team of Alleynians were the overall winners of the WOH Achievement Award in 2010 and won a trip to India to visit some of the schools WOH supports. This year Dulwich College again offered teams of Year 9 boys a chance to compete for the award and Team Change ( James Blakemore, Louis Wright, Jim Bannister, Felipe Bunge and Jack Ramsay ) reached the WOHAA Semi-Finals held on Tuesday 29th April at The House of Lords. In the following article the boys describe something of their fund-raising efforts and the motivation for supporting WOH. W e chose to do a charity auction because we thought that it was the most effective way to raise money. For our auction we
by working both individually and together. The second problem was that our main help for the making of the auction, Natalie (from the DC IT department) was ill for a week, and we had to handle the technicalities of the auction by ourselves, which was very difficult. But, being Team Change, we overcame this problem, with the help of other teachers and taking on the challenge by ourselves. Arguably the biggest problems that we had were the time constraints. However, through determination and a massive sense of teamwork, we overcame this problem, and finished the auction as well as organising the presentation; it turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable exercise. We got many things from our experience this year. For example we felt we learnt some key skills such as leadership, teamwork and most of all determination. We were very tight for time but we managed to pull through with all of these skills playing an important role. We had such a good time this year that we are almost certain to enter again and all our experiences this year will serve us good for next year. We will be looking to do more than just one event and hopefully prepare ourselves better so that we don’t run out of time. “The childrenWOH helps come from very poor backgrounds and live in poorer countries. They don’t have the chance to do any of those things but WOH gives them the chance to get a good education. An education can change their lives, which is why we helped to support them.”
sent one email and posted on Facebook once. Then people donated if they wanted to and liked the look of the prizes. Not because they thought they had to. We live in a country where everyone has the right to an education. At Dulwich, we are very lucky to get an excellent education with great teachers and facilities. Not only that, but we can play sport, learn musical instruments and act in plays. But the children WOH helps come from very poor backgrounds and live in poorer countries. They don’t have the chance to do any of those things but WOH gives them the chance to get a good education. An education can change their lives, which is why we helped to support them. We sold a signed Ronaldo shirt, Chelsea tickets, dinner at a Gordon Ramsay restaurant and much more. Around three weeks after sending off our video about what we did to raise the money and how we did it we received an email. It said that we had reached the semi-final. We did not really know what this meant at the time. We did some further investigation, and it turned out we had made the top 35 out of the 392 contestants. We were very pleased. We travelled to the House of Lords, where we had to present what we had done to a panel of judges: Sean Biggerstaff from the Harry Potter films, Sir David Jason and some other judges who were part of the charity. We then attended the awards ceremony. During our WOHAA experience we encountered some problems. One of the hardest things to do was secure the prizes: this was so difficult because we had such a varied range of prizes coming from so many different people, and it was very hard to secure all of them. But we overcame this problem
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