Tag: crowdfunding campaign

Crowd, the Cure to Ebola Outbreak?

Author
Alex Taylor
Date

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Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has warned that the Ebola crisis in West Africa is “unprecedented, absolutely out of control.”

Cases of Ebola have been confirmed in more than 60 locations across the three affected countries, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. As MSF work to contain the Ebola outbreak, the geographic vastness of the situation is presenting an unprecedented difficulty. Aid workers in the region are becoming increasingly reliant on The Crowd to collate data and map these broad regions.

One example is Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). It is a Crowdsourced project to provide mapping and tracking to the region.

A New Scientist article from earlier this year outlined how doctors from MSF upon arriving in Guinea were initially deprived of the data and mapping required to coordinate their efforts. The organization turned to the HOT, to map the city of Guéckédou, in southern Guinea. Sylvie de Laborderie who coordinated the effort with HOT said “the map showed two roads maybe – nothing, nothing.” HOT within 20 hours had mapped 100,000 buildings across three cities.

The epidemic has to spread to neighboring countries and with MSF and World Health Organisation indicating that they have reached the limit of their resources. A new urgency has emerged to contain the outbreak and educate the population in vast unmapped areas. HOT has been reactivated and are currently mapping Sierra Leone. Along with a twitter campaign #map4ebola, HOT are providing aid organisations with interactive maps to help track outbreaks.

As doctors and aid workers in these regions go to sleep hundreds of people around the world are tirelessly working to bring clarity to a desperately complex situation. If we are to cure and contain Ebola in West Africa The Crowd is going to be a critically important facet.

 

A Hungry Crowd

Author
Hugo Smyly
Date

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With 80% of food sales going through 5 major retailers you could be forgiven for thinking that this oligopoly is irreversible, however there has been a recent, dramatic rise in the popularity of farmers markets with UK consumers seemingly showing a keen interest in sourcing and buying their food directly from producers.

Farmdrop, a click and collect farmers market, was founded in 2012 with the aim of providing a space where people who make or grow food can sell it direct. One of the biggest problems faced by farmers in the UK is that by selling their produce to major retailers they are making significantly lower profit than if they were to sell it directly. One of the co-founders Ben Pugh reaffirms this by stating that Farmdrop allows for suppliers to keep ‘80% of the retail price of their goods, rather than the 50% they might make through traditional retailers’.

Farmdrop have turned to equity Crowdfunding in a bid to expand their number of ‘hubs’ across the UK from 5 to 60 with an end goal of 400 by 2017. They reached their £400,000 target within just eight days and have extended the campaign, it has currently raised £473,250 with 42 days left.

In what has been one of the most successful Crowdfunding campaigns in the UK to date it appears the Crowd are backing this innovative new approach to buying and selling food.

How many of us will end up “Crowdfunding” the system?

Author
Charlotte Marsh
Date

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Reason I ask, it is becoming more and more common for people to raise money directly for educational events or for new equipment for hospitals, donations would normally be associated with charities and research but these days we chose to step in and help out others.

You are ultimately backing a good cause of course and I have no problem with that whatsoever.

A few years back I decided to donate a small amount of money a month to some charities, I try to spread that amount of money across a few charities and change them from time to time so everyone gets a small donation. I’m no saint and I am not trying to make myself feel better, it’s just a good thing to do, in my opinion. These charities do great work for many different reasons, funded by most of us and a little help from elsewhere.

The problem is when I was asked to donate to raise some money towards new hospital equipment it occurred to me that this isn’t a charity, this is a hospital which I’m already funding through my taxes, or am I? Of course I didn’t object and donated to this very good cause and pleased to say my friends and their children raised just over £1000!

If we the population, the “Crowd” are stepping in and helping out with the local services, are we letting the Government off the hook? We hope we have helped additionally to what the Government were going to give and not instead of.

But should we feel the need to step in, because the help is to slow to come? Are we just helping out? How many of us will additionally “Crowdfund” the system?

Adopt a classroom

Author
Alex Taylor
Date

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According to the UK Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) over 90% of teachers buy supplies for their pupils. While most purchases are to enhance in-class or extra-curricular activities, as many as half of all teachers have bought stationary, pens and disturbingly textbooks. UK school teachers are dishing out on average £250 a year from their own pockets.

In the US teachers are turning to Crowdfunding to help fund everything from pencils to microscopes.

One such schools Crowdfunding platform, DonorsChoose.org, have raised a staggering $250 million for 464,596 projects that have assisted the education of more than 10 million pupils across in the US. Most Crowdfunding requests are for grass-roots supplies.

The thanks from Reddit’s ‘Gifts For the Teachers’ Program, which raised £200,000 in 2013, gives an indication of the level of appreciation Crowdfunding can bring to our children’s teachers – ‘Thank you so much for your generous gift of colored pencils and tape! I literally squealed in excitement when I opened the box…I can’t wait to give the supplies to my students who cannot afford to buy their own. THANK YOU!!!’

Crowdfunding for schools is not just about basic school supplies. Some are reaching for more lofty targets, science Crowdfunding platform experiment.com have seen a number of teaching related projects aiming to get secondary school students involved in real science.

Crowdfunding in schools has yet to really kick off here in the UK. Hubbub is an education reward-based platform that is well placed to be there when it does. While most projects through the platform have so far have been university focused, it is open to schools, teachers and individual students.

As the gap between state funding and the ambitions of schools grow, Crowdfunding will have a greater prominence in UK education.