I’m sure we have all heard of Comic Relief or ‘Red nose day’ as some may call it. But if you are not aware, it’s the day; every two years when people all around the country will help fundraise for the charity and it helps raise money to help people who are living tough lives in the UK and Africa. Whichever name you know it by I’m sure that you are aware of the huge success that it is.
Between January 2014 and September 2015, Comic Relief allocated £87.8m to 144 projects. Comic relief supports a range of work across three continents. The majority of the work focuses on helping children access education, enabling the world’s poorest people to access health care or working to transform the status of women and girls in Africa so that they can achieve their full potential. Comic Relief is one of the UK’s biggest independent funders of international development. Most of the grants are for long-term development and last 3-5 years with the majority being in Sub-Saharan Africa. £5.4m was granted to UK projects for initiatives such as Bereavement Therapy for Bereaved Children, improving the lives of disabled and disadvantaged people and empowering women and girls.
Even though this fundraising event may seem like a relatively new idea, it was actually established on Christmas Day in 1975, when Comic relief launched live on BBC One from the Safawa refugee camp in Sudan during Noel Edmonds’ “Late Late Breakfast Show”. But the first Red Nose Day didn’t arrive until the 5th February 1988, when Lenny Henry, who still is a big contributor to this event now, celebrates Red Nose Day with a group of Children in Ethiopia.
Nowadays, many more celebrities are contributing to this charity event, which is great for raising awareness of the charity. One example includes when in 2009; nine celebrities climbed up Mt Kilimanjaro and raised over £3m! This showed how celebrities could make a positive change by encouraging people to vote by doing wacky challenges.
But it’s not just the celebrities that help do the fundraising. Many people now contribute to this charity by doing various fundraising events such as bake sales or even just buying a red nose could make a big difference, as all the profits will go to the charity. Many children are involved in fundraising through schools and after school clubs and there is always a fun element to the fundraising, which has helped to make this a popular charity.
This year in 2017, so far, £73,026,234 has been raised. This money will go to helping thousands of people worldwide who need support. I think it is a good thing that so much money can be raised in this country to distribute to people who really need it.
by Sophie Reilly, Sydenham High School
