Joyous Act 3/2011
March’s Joyous Act was a lot of work to organise and a little bit painful but worth every second. The idea came to me while I was watching a TV programme about last year’s Sports Relief. It occurred to me that if all of Series 6 Apprentices came together we could raise some potentially serious money for charity, Sports Relief was a great idea as it as much about the challenge as it is about team work and a common goal. Something Apprentice candidates should relish.
I took to twitter and got agreement in principle from almost all my colleagues from Series 6. It took some pushing and shoving but most people were pretty game. Next thing was to contact Comic Relief with our ideas – turned out Sports Relief isn’t again until 2012 so it was Red Nose Day that would get our attention.
Chris Farrell, ex-army boy and scouser had the great idea of doing a military style assault course. Personally I’d have quite liked to jump out of a plane – we let Comic Relief decide and understandably they thought the assualt course would be most amusing
Once this was all set up we set about launching and fundraising.
With the help of local businesses and venue Chameleon Bar & Grill in Birmingham we set up a day running around offices collecting cash, inventing cocktails which we served at the bar well into the night. All proceeds went straight to Comic Relief. The night was brilliant – a huge amount of energy from everyone and great fun.
So the launch was done – we were knackerd! Myself, Dan Harris, Liz Locke, Laura Moore , Jamie Lester, Chrs Bates and Alex Epstein tore up Birmingham and I have to say, the City did us proud. We made all the local papers and radio which was great publicity for the cause.
Then came the big day. The assault course was looming. OMG. I was NOT looking forward to this. Everyone listed above plus Melissa Cohen, Paloma Vivanco, Realeigh Addington, Shibby Robarty and Stuart Baggs took part. The BBC filmed it and boy did we give it our best! It took us 38 minutes in the end to get round the course. We had to crawl under barbed wire, climb walls, down muddy banks, through tunnels and all in freezing water – it was actually exhilarating! I loved every minutes of it!
We’re still not sure exactly how much money we raised – we made more than 2.5 thousand on launch day but the money is still being counted from the web donations.
This link shows the video of our efforts!