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."