Friday 11 June 2010

Orange wellies hit festivals


Summer is here and the festival season has kicked off. Every year you hear of a new sustainable initiative from eco festivals that aim to be carbon neutral, eco tents that are recyclable, through to recycling incentives of beer and chocolate for festival goers who pick up a bag of rubbish during their stay.

One of the brands well known for sustainable festival gadgets, is Orange, helping to power mobiles when conventional power is lacking. They introduced the dance powered mobile phone charger at Glastonbury and their latest addition thermoelectric wellies that charge your mobile are bound to be a hit in the English, not always so sunny summer!

So with your wellies on, your bin bag and eadible tent to hand, you're ready to minimise your impact and have fun at the next festival near you.

Monday 7 June 2010

'Because that's how Piers sees it'...but is it enough?


If anyone could bear to sit through Piers Morgan’s World Cup South Africa programme last night with its African chanting in the background and Piers Morgan fighting back the tears as he listened to clips of Nelson Mandela’s famous inaugural speech from 1994, then you are perhaps a more tolerant person than I am. However, Piers Morgan firmly aside, the programme was actually delivering a really important message about the role of sport within South African communities. Sport, and particularly football, is so much more than a game – it improves the physical and mental wellbeing of the population, it brings people together, it provides a platform for the delivery of vital public health message, it teaches tolerance, fair play, discipline and valuable leadership and teamwork skills and for many it is what keeps them going from one day to the next. Today, many agree that sport could be a very effective means of achieving the Millennium Development Goals that Kiri mentioned in her last post.

Sport as a tool for social change is not a new concept - organisations such as the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation have been funding projects worldwide that are delivering and promoting sport for development for many years. However, although there has been a lot of talk, there are still very few governments, donors, NGOs and businesses that are actually taking action to recognise, invest in and advance sport for development. Will the World Cup in South Africa change this? There have been lots of discussions about the social legacy of the tournament and the responsibility of different stakeholders to ensure that the benefits don’t end when the final match whistle blows, but is it enough? It would be nice to think that Piers and even Glee’s Sue Sylvester talking about the benefits of sport is a sign that times are changing but I am understandably sceptical. The World Cup is a rare opportunity to influence attitudes and opinions, a chance to put sport firmly on the agenda – let’s not leave it up to Piers to make this happen.

Thursday 3 June 2010

Virtually impossible to pick one... but let's see...

I've been keeping my eye on The Global Poverty Project for a while now. As we all know, our new Prime Minister Cameron, along with the world's leaders, will be gathering in New York in September to assess the progress in achieving The Millennium Development Goals. If you're not familiar with the eight goals, here they are:

1. Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger
2. Achieve Universal Primary Education
3. Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a Global Partnership for Development

This project is asking us to choose which goal we feel needs the greatest attention. Now some might say this is an exercise in futility but seeing the general consensus could be very revealing. All the issues since 2000 have had major improvements but it's evident that some areas are still failing. The new government has said that they will "create new mechanisms to give British people a direct say in how an element of the aid budget is spent." So by making a choice through The Global Poverty Project we can all make our voice heard. And this may make for a very interesting Review Summit.