As enjoyable as I find the musings of @stephenfry and emotional rants of @nottm_forest (my beloved football team), I’ve recently stumbled upon a twitter feed that feels altogether more wholesome.
Arguably my advocacy of @learnasone is biased by the fact I’m a close friend of the founder of the charity of the same name. In a nutshell, Steve gave up a successful career in marketing to realise his ambition of setting up a charity to help provide education to children in Africa. Following 18 months of living at home to save money, rarely going out and working some crazy hours, Steve’s vision is coming true.
The founding principles of LearnAsOne are:
- Complete transparency in respect of where and how the money is spent
- A strong focus on using social media
Not only is LAO using social media to tell the children’s stories (more below), but the likes of Facebook and Twitter have acted as the catalyst for Steve to assemble a volunteer force of talented photographers, journalists and web developers.
Steve’s just finished his first field trip to Zambia, identifying a non-government organisation to partner with, a community to support and documenting it all online – notably via Twitter. Spending a school day with Saviour, a 10 year old girl from Chibwe Farm (including a 14km round trip walk to school!) and tweeting about it in real time has proven to be highly emotive.
Ultimately this innovative approach has created a totally different experience from that of donating to a traditional charity like the NSPCC (which I’ve supported for a number of years). Indeed, the opportunity to tweet a question to someone living 5000 miles away – who I’m potentially going to impact directly with my contribution – gives the charity a wholly more personal feel.
As LAO leave the Simakakata community in Zambia, they’ve also educated them in how to post their own blog entries and make use of a “flip” to post videos online. This means the story telling can continue now that Steve and team have left, keeping followers of LAO abreast of how their money is being spent.
Trying to figure out whom to “follow” next? A charity with a decent story to tell isn’t a bad bet!
