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Background & FAQs

Giving Nation is a Citizenship Foundation project that supports secondary schools undertaking work to support charity and community.

We understand voluntary action to be a key component of active citizenship.  It can be done most effectively and to greatest satisfaction when students understand the socio-political context of their voluntary action. We see charities as voluntary social coalitions; examples of citizen action. They are most effective when they use the breadth of their supporters’ capacity to affect social change.  When young people learn their capacity to affect change and enjoin it to that of others through voluntary giving they become empowered to not only participate in but to lead processes of social change.  This is great citizenship!

The Challenge has been designed to compliment the citizenship and the enterprise curricular requirements.
By forming a short-lived social enterprise students similarly create an innovative company with social purpose. They use the skills and techniques of enterprise to address their concerns for their community.  Social enterprises differ from charities in that the bulk of their money comes from trading (rather than from donations) but often look towards similar outcomes.  When set in the enterprise curriculum student’s activities may be subtly different from the citizenship ones, but the learning outcomes will be guided very differently.

How Does it work?
Each class across a year develops their own project and then works to win the hearts and minds of their schoolmates for the cause of their own choosing.  To enable this to happen they are given a start-up grant of £50 per class.  The grant must be incorporated into a plan of action that is agreed by the whole class.  After a fixed period (perhaps 6 weeks) all classes deliver their activities more or less simultaneously.  They are like charities or companies in competition for the public’s (the school’s) attention.

After the activities are done – the school judges which has been the most effective. The students debrief their activities in the light of real-life charities or social enterprises and are helped to comprehend the nature of charitable action and its influence on society.

What year do I do it with?
That is your choice. We have designed the materials with year 9 in mind as our research showed us that this was teachers’ most common choice. We believe that teachers will be able to adapt the level of content quite easily for younger or older year groups.

How Do I Get the Grant?
We have done all we can to make this simple!
All schools in England are eligible for the grant. It is applied for as £50 for every class across a year group: so you might request £150 if you are a small school, £300 if you are large. Follow the instructions in the grant section.

Can any school apply?

Any secondary or secondary-deemed middle school in England is currently able to apply.  Middle schools must use the funds in a Keystage 3 programme.

Do I get £50 per class every year?
Sadly, no. This grant is given as a once-only offer to participating schools.

At the end of the year we expect schools to replenish the grant so that the following year group can do the Challenge. This may be achieved in a few different ways:

1/ Money used by classes to seed fund-raising activities will be returned i.e. if a class used £50 for activities that leave them with £300 in their possession, the £50 should return and £250 got to the charity

2/ If the money is used to support a volunteering programme or campaign action where there is outlay that benefits an outside cause we hope that the school will find a benefactor to replenish the money in recognition of the students’ activities.  In this regard we are working towards a national network of such supporters in order to make this simpler for schools.

Do we have to tell you what we did with the money?
Not quite. What we ask is that your classes use our online facilities to run the Challenge.  When they do we, and the whole world, gets to see what they’ve been up to!

This is where we’ve made it simple, fun and highly educational!

Each class’s Team get to use our suite of project planning tools to run their project. These create presentations so that the Team update the class week-by week and allow communal decisions to be made on the nature of their project.  It also creates a mini-web site, allowing students to see what each other class is up to, and for the wider world to log on and see what your school is doing for others.  It even allows you to see your final accounts and report when time’s up!

What if it goes wrong and we don’t make it happen?
Well… we won’t send the heavies round for the money; we’ll just think it was your loss.  In practice we think it’s an idea that will work.  Our risk.

What makes you think teachers will like this?

The programme was researched for us with focus groups of teachers of varying levels of seniority, pupils and bursars.  It came out as very popular and we have designed our content in the light of their comments.

See the research here if you wish!

What if we’re stuck for ideas?
The students’ web sit has many links to other avenues of support to prompt their thinking, as do the supporting class materials.

What if they get the bug?  Are we going to open a can of worms and the place goes chaotic?
We think it’s pretty controllable.

We advise you to start the process with something like an assembly to warn the school what, say, Year 9 are about to do, and perhaps designate certain areas or times for activities to take place.  Because each class has to coordinate their plans together in lesson time (or they won’t get their money!) teachers will watch the ideas emerge.  There shouldn’t be any “kidnapping the headteacher for Oxfam” or the like.

What if they want to keep going?
We′re all for that.  In fact we’ve teamed up with The Big Boost Fund and can offer grants of up to £2,000 for groups of students building social enterprise ideas.  And our web site has loads of ideas and resources to help extra-curricular projects.

What are the "Giving Nation Awards" that are on your site?
Glad you asked. Every year we support schools who have done remarkable things for charity and community with regional awards to recognise their actions. Schools who take part in the Challenge will find their mini-site alongside the Awards sites in “My School” on the students’ web site (see an example here).  To have a chance of winning an Award (£1,000 per area + an overall national; prize of a charity related experience… next year a trip to Kenya with Sightsavers) enter the other sections in the awards and tell us what else your school has done for others.
 

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