Ian Wright and His Unfit Kids

Ian Wright ran an interesting experiment with Unfit Kids on Channel 4. Last night was interesting because Ian Wright was looking to extend his programme throughout the local education borough and then throughout the UK. He had written to 100 businesses for support. He wanted £170,000 to be able to offer programmes for 20 schools for one year. The best offer that he received was money for 3 schools for 1 term: he decided to match that money from his own funds so that he could extend that to 2 terms.

Now, part of me thinks that there are grant-making bodies that would fall over themselves to award Ian Wright funding for such an excellent project. Including some of the one's mentioned in a Guardian piece about the topic of children's health and the hope that this series would be as influential about exercise as Jamie's School Dinners series. On the other hand, I'm surprised that UK businesses were not more forthcoming. Is it just that business doesn't want to be associated with overweight children who are on the verge of being excluded? Given some of the adverse coverage that Cadbury's had for running the schools sports equipment scheme, are other businesses gun-shy of being hypocritical when it is their computer technology that the children find more attractive than exercise, or their junk food products that children consume more than the healthier options?

The Unreliability of Strangers

I have whinged in the past about how difficult it is to prise a response out of people when making enquiries. Well, back in April, I made more than 100 enquiries about collaborative partnerships for various projects that I have in mind for the Big Lottery Well-being Funding Initiative.

Most of the contacts were given to me by Big Lottery - there were descriptions of the areas in which people were interested, and the name and contact details of the person co-ordinating the initiative. Despite supplying a document with live links (just think how easy it would have been to test the validity of the addresses), more than 40% of the email addresses were mis-quoted. One of the most laborious tasks that I had was experimenting with various permutations of names or tracking the organisations via Google to try and work out what the domain name should be for the email address.

Some people responded and snarked that they weren't too sure of what was happening in their organisation because they were having a re-organisation, so effectively, "Why are you bothering me?". These were the named contacts who had agreed to be listed as co-ordinators on the Big Lottery contact list. They were all paid to answer these enquries and to do so as part of their responsibilities. It mightn't be pleasant, but they were the named contact.