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Let’s Clean Up the World is going ahead nicely and I’m glad to say that there are some Chambers, who are making preparations to make the day a success.

- JCI Barnsley is holding their clean up action on 27th May 2012 at Church Side Community Park as they wish to collaborate along side a local action group. The aim of the clean up is to make the park safe and reopen again. Looking forward to seeing the photos from the day in June!

- JCI Southampton will be cleaning up an area of Hamble Beach on 13th May, they will also be inviting friends of members and their family to have a larger turnout. Get in touch if you want to go and join them or let all your friends know in Southampton!

- JCI Liverpool will be meeting at Mercury Court at 1pm on the day to clean up several areas close to the city centre and after meet up for coffee and tea. Everyone is invited – including YOU!

- JCI London will be joining the big summer clean up with Thames21 on 7th July and all the Londoners are welcome to take part. Ask for more details.

Its very admirable that the Chambers above have decided to roll up their sleeves to make a lasting change to their communities. I do hope share some inspiring photos with all of you in June!

Triin Paavel
Let's Clean the World project lead 

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It is now only three weeks until World Malaria Day, where does the time go?
 
Thanks to those chambers that have already let me know what their plans are for World Malaria Day, but to those chambers that haven’t yet done so, it’s not too late!
 
Whilst we would like as many chambers as possible to organise a fundraising event on Wednesday 25 April to commemorate World Malaria Day, events organised the weekend before or after, or even later in the year are just as important.
 
No matter how large or small your proposed event is, anything you can do to either raise the profile and/or generate much-needed funds to combat the global threat posed by malaria, will be very much appreciated.  The UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets campaign really does rely on organisations like ours to continue the fight on their behalf.
 
Local chambers in the UK are organising the following events to ‘make a difference’ in support of World Malaria Day:
 
JCI Leeds has a member who had organised a sponsored parachute jump
JCI Manchester are organising charity fund-raising dinner
JCI London are organising a pub quiz
JCI Cambridge are raising awareness of the campaign by selling orange Nothing But Nets wrist-bands to friends, family, work colleagues and the general public.
 
*STOP PRESS*
 
It’s not too late for your chamber to organise an event or fundraising activities, for ideas please read my previous blog by clicking here.
 
If I can be of any assistance to help you and your chamber in raising funds for the ongoing global fight against Malaria, especially on World Malaria Day, please do not hesitate to contact me.
 
Best Regards,
 
Richard Tong
JCI UK Project Lead, Nothing But Nets

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Have you ever felt upset when you've seen a gorgeous beach covered in plastic or your local park covered in litter?
Have you ever questioned if there would be anything that could be done about it?

On 24 March, the global civic action World Clean Up 2012, was launched with clean-up initiatives taking place in Portugal and Slovenia, eventually making its way to the UK on 13 May 2012. The aim of the action is to solve illegal dumping problem on a global and global level by engaging large part of the society on the action day and raising the issues related to illegal dumping.

JCI UK Chambers have also decided to take the lead and arrange a clean-up action in their local communities.

• JCI Liverpool is working with the Commercial District BID, the body responsible for delivering the development and improvements in the commercial district of Liverpool, and local businesses to make the day a success.
• JCI Barnsley has decided to make a difference in their Church Side Community Park, which was vandalised and made unsafe about six months ago. According to JCI Barnsley President Kirstie Barnett, they are hoping to work alongside the local action group for the area and a volunteer group from Barnsley to make the park safe for it to be reopened again.
• Furthermore, JCI Southampton has showed great enthusiasm in in the project and is keen to arrange their own action, in case they manage to locate a suitable area in their local community.
• For clean-up action with JCI Bradford, keep your eyes and ears open after Easter, when the details will be announced.
• As for the Londoners, they are doing their bit for the campaign as part of the West London foreshore Big Summer clean up on 7 July 2012.

In case your chamber is not running a clean-up, but you would like to get involved, why not contact the chambers mentioned above to join? Or if you think your chamber should take part and know of a good location for the clean-up, why not get in touch with your community director or council team and ask to run it? It's a fantastic and fun project to get involved in - let's do it!

Triin Paavel
Project Leader, Let's Clean Up the World

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Last year JCI UK launched their Active Citizen Experience (ACE) award programme. The awards recognised JCI members for volunteering their time, both inside and outside of local chamber and in their local community.

This year ACE will continue to run as it did last year. We will still have Gold (30 hours) Silver (20 hours) and Bronze (10 hours) awards for volunteering in the community. We aim to improve the offering by extending this to three other key JCI areas that impact our communities and ourselves, namely volunteering in relation to our business, personal development and international projects.

So if you are volunteering in any of the four key areas of:

• Community
• Business
• Personal Development
• International.

Then please make sure you start to record and log your hours, click here to register.

At Inspiration Day the Active Citizen Framework was delivered by our 2012 National President Solveig and the ambition for this year is to make ACE;

• A better tool to support what we already do
• Contribute toward a framework that communicates what we do
• Measure and demonstrate our impact of JCI UK.

For more information contact the project lead, Dexter Dash, JCI London.

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The global campaign of 'Let's Do It! World' will kick off on Saturday 24 March. In more than 60 countries in the world, people come together for one day to clean up their local areas from illegal rubbish. The date for cleaning up UK has been set to Sunday 13 May and JCI UK has decided to take the lead on it.

If your chamber is not yet participating then there are three reasons why you should take part in the project:

1. Amazing way to get together the whole chamber and do something good for the local community
2. Opportunity to engage with the local council, schools and companies
3. Raise the profile of JCI as an organisation of young leaders who not only dream, but make things happen!

It is very easy to take part.

You just need together a group of people from your chamber, who can locate an area, where the clean up would take place, estimate the amount of garbage you plan to clean up and try to engage as many people as possible to make it happen.

There are three chambers who have already taken the lead - JCI Bradford, JCI Liverpool and JCI London. Would your chamber want to get involved in Let's Do It JCI UK? If so, get in touch for more information, put together a team and LET'S DO IT!

Below you'll find couple of videos about the project and also a link to the global website.

Talking Tom and Ben News: World Clean-up 2012

World Clean-up Day

Let's do it world

For more information and support contact project lead Triin Paavel, JCI London

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World Malaria Day 2012 takes place on Wednesday 25 April. On this day JCI UK hopes that chambers all over the UK will use their passion, commitment and energy to 'make a difference' in the battle against malaria. Members will be organising a variety of events to raise awareness and much needed funds for the Nothing But Nets campaign, as well as helping JCI UK to achieve its Nothing But Nets fund raising target for 2012.

It used to be that a child died every 30 seconds from malaria, but thanks to efforts made by organisations such as JCI, this has now increased to one child every 45 seconds. So you can see progress has been made but there still remains a long way to go to increase this time period to one minute and beyond. All the funds raised by your chambers will bring this target one step closer to being realised.

I know that some chambers have already got an event lined up for World Malaria Day, ranging from a pub quiz to a JCI UK sponsored parachute jump. For those chambers that haven't yet decided and are still looking for inspiration, here are some ideas for you and your council teams to think about:

• Wear orange at work day (the colour of the JCI Nothing But Nets campaign)
• Hold a charity lunch or dinner
• Guess the number or weight of a jar full of pennies, sweets etc.
• Cake sale
• Guess the bonus ball in the national lottery
• Karaoke night
• Caption competition - choose a photo from, for example, your last office party and ask entrants to pay per caption
• Card games evening (penny poker)
• Indoor games evening
• Dry cream cracker challenge - eat as many dry cream crackers in a minute, not as easy as it sounds!
• Quote quiz - collect as many quotes from movies, songs and so on and then test the knowledge of friends, family and work colleagues
• Bingo
• Smarties challenge - give your friends, family and work colleagues a tube of smarties and when they've eaten them, ask them to fill the empty tube with £1 coins
• iPod party - organise a evening event and then ask people to donate to play songs from their iPod - the worse the song the more they should pay!
• Cheese and wine evening - try classic combinations such as port and stilton or why not make up your own?
• Take the stairs not the lift and get sponsored per step
• Make your boss the most popular person in the office by getting them to donate a day's paid holiday as a raffle prize
• Darts competition
• Clothes Collection - JCI UK has again teamed up with 'Bag 2 the Future' to recycle old clothes and fundraise at the same time. To arrange a collection, the contact at 'Bag 2 the Future' is ian.woods@bag2thefuture.org

Another way for chambers to raise funds is to sell the JCI UK Nothing But Nets wrist-bands. To obtain a batch for your chamber, please contact Immediate Past National President Allison Cowell at allison.cowell@jciuk.org.uk  

If local presidents can let me know which event their chamber is holding on 25 April, I can then arrange for this information to be shared with other chambers.

Also, as happened last year, JCI UK has an agreement with the Dutch Cordaid foundation who will double whatever funds we generate, so if local chambers can arrange for all the money they raise to be given to JCI UK, we will send it to the Dutch Cordaid foundation and they will double the amount, result!

So what will you be doing on Wednesday 25 April?

I hope this has given you some useful ideas on how to raise awareness and much needed funds for JCI Nothing But Nets but if you require any further information, please feel free to e-mail me at richard.tong@jciuk.org.uk

Many thanks, Richard Tong

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You may remember that last year some JCI's around the UK linked up with a Colin Nesbitt of Little Heroes, a children cancer charity based in Bradford. Colin travelled around the UK dropping presents off at children's cancer hospitals in the run up to Christmas.

He's aiming to do the same thing again this year, can you help? If you can contact Colin direct at littleheroes@hotmail.co.uk to introduce yourself and express your interest in helping him that would be fantastic.

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The last clothes collection in aid of the Nothing But Nets Campaign by JCI Boston took place on the 30th September, 95 bags were collected, this should take their overall total to over £800! Thank you for your donations. JCI Barnsley also raised in excess of £50.00 from their clothing collection earlier in the year and JCI London also got in on the action by arranging a clothes way event!

It really is as easy as collecting old clothes from friends, family, colleagues, members and anyone else you can think of! Then simply contact Bag 2 the Future who will send you bags to put the clothes in and arrange a pick up date. They will pick up the clothes and send you a cheque! It really is that simple to send a net and save a life with JCI Nothing But Nets campaign!

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An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters.

Because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water has taken so long to recede, many trees have become cocooned in spiders webs.

People in this part of Sindh have never seen this phenomenon before but they also report that there are now far fewer mosquitoes than they would expect, given the amount of stagnant, standing water that is around.

It is thought that the mosquitos are getting caught in the spiders web thus reducing the risk of malaria, which would be one blessing for the people of Sindh, facing so many other hardships after the floods.

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The JCI UK Penny War is nearing its end, so collect up those pennies and send us the pounds! As a final twist in this tale we are asking Chambers and individuals to create pictures with their pennies and email them to me so that I can judge the best and a prize will be awarded at National Convention.

So email me those pics and lets see if we can save a few more lives and support the JCI Nothing But Nets Campaign!

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