1. Matt Chappell 10G
Citizenship Coursework
My citizenship coursework is about my charity and fundraising event in
year 7 organised by Miss Naish for personal challenge. Personal
challenge is normally a lesson in school, based on challenging and
improving us mentally. We had to make an activity up to help raise
money for a chosen charity, I chose the RSPCA while my partner picked
the PDSA. For the activity, we had to run stalls or small scaled activities
for several hours on a Saturday.
The primary aim was to raise money for the two charities, while making
people aware of them using leaflets and boards set up on our table stall.
We thought of many activities to do to raise the money but none were
thought viable to be able to do in a diminutive area of space. I came up
with the idea to do an activity, which was easy to organise and wouldn’t
cost too much. The activity I chose was called “Knock The Teacher’s
Blocks Off”, where a person would have to throw 5 tennis balls at 6
bottles of water with a teacher’s face pictured on to the front. Everybody
would get a different amount of sweets or chocolate depending on how
many bottles were knocked down but somebody who managed to know
them all down with 5 tennis balls or less would go into a raffle and at the
end of the day, if that person won the raffle then they would get a box of
chocolates.
To get involved, we had to put our names down on a sheet being carried
by Miss Naish’s helpers and when we were able to get consent from our
parents, we then had to tell Miss Naish that we could help out at the
charity event.
I wanted to get involved with this as it benefitted both me and the two
charities as the RSPCA and PDSA received money from us.
All the responsibility of the activity was on me and my friend – safety,
game play, time and equipment. We were in a group of three to start with
but the other person refused to do the event so we decided to split from
him. Earlier in the year, he had helped us research about the RSPCA and
PDSA. As there was only one charity day, we only ran our activity once
but if we had had the chance to do it again the next day then maybe we
would have. Although, it took quite a bit of work and time to do it as
there was the cost of equipment – prizes, 5 tennis balls and 6 empty two
litre bottles and a lot of preparation and organisation just to make it
happen.

2. Matt Chappell 10G
This activity helped others by giving them a sense of charitable giving
and it also let people know that this charity has no government funding.
The charity event boosted my confidence when organising an activity and
when talking to people, though I didn’t really need a new skill as it
wasn’t that challenging and one of the few skills that I needed for it were
organisational skills, speaking skills and financial skills. The boost of
confidence and belief that we would be able to do it will help us later in
life.
From this, I learnt about myself that I’ll try to commit myself to the
activity or work without giving up. For this, I contributed one hundred
percent of my time and effort to making it work. I think I am pleased with
what we did as it turned out alright and raised some money. One of the
only things that surprised me were the popularity of the activity as it was
quite fun for visitors and users of the stall. We just got people to have a
go by asking them, which took a bit of confidence to do, to go up to
strangers and ask them if they would like to have a go at out stall.
One of the problems was that there was a limited amount of space for the
activity as we only received a corner. I would have liked half of one
corridor so that the tennis balls that were thrown wouldn’t roll into the
dining hall where the rest of the activities were being taken place.
Overall, I did enjoy this activity because it was fun and it had a good
cause. It benefitted almost everyone as it made the people feel good and
they had helped us raise money for the charities and we were grateful that
they complied to have a go. If I got another chance to do it again, I would
have liked more space for the stall and I probably would have built it on a
bigger scale so maybe, based it on difficulty depending on age range. In
the end, I thoroughly enjoyed organising the activity and helping raise
money.