Thursday, January 13, 2011

A Big Thought turns to action as Dallas-area children lead service projects | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | News: Education

A Big Thought turns to action as Dallas-area children lead service projects | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | News: Education: "A child might experience something that Big Thought has helped to happen along the way or caused to happen, but when they go home they say, 'Oh, Mom, Dad, I made an X-Y-Z,' ' Big Thought president and CEO Gigi Antoni said. 'It's hard to connect sometimes our work to us because we're in a lot of ways invisible down on the ground.'

That's beginning to change.

Big Thought teamed with the North Texas Super Bowl XLV Host Committee to create SLANT 45, an education-through-public-service initiative that organized more than 44,000 children in more than 446,000 hours of community service in 2010."

What Messi, Xavi and Iniesta can teach the UK about charitable giving | Musa Okwonga | Independent Eagle Eye Blogs

What Messi, Xavi and Iniesta can teach the UK about charitable giving | Musa Okwonga | Independent Eagle Eye Blogs: "There is certainly an appetite for learning about giving in UK schools. In 2007, with support from the investment bank Credit Suisse, we introduced the Youth and Philanthropy Initiative (YPI), a Canadian programme, to ten schools in London. YPI, which was devised by Julie Toskan-Casale, the founder of MAC Cosmetics, has a simple premise. In each YPI school, students aged between 14 and 16 form teams of three or four, and go into their local communities, visiting and researching charities who are addressing issues that they feel strongly about. Having done so, they return to school and give impassioned presentations in front of their peers, advocating for the charities whose causes they have taken up. The winning team, decided by a panel of judges, receives an award of �3,000 on behalf of their charity. YPI is an initiative to which pupils have taken with great relish; it is now in over 100 UK schools, and by the summer, over 40,000 participants will have distributed over �700,000 to local charities. Recently, too, the family trust of Sir Ian Wood, one of Scotland’s wealthiest businessmen, has taken over the direction of YPI in Scotland, in the aim that it will be in 1 in 8 of all schools there within three years."