We Learn

Carlisle College provide their staff with the opportunity to contribute in the community as part of their professional development. Two teams comprising 65 people were part of Give A Day 2022. Team one created a safe place for refugees. Team two renovated the garden and built a new community space for Carlisle Key, an organisation…

A resident wanted to encourage children at her local school to think about others in their community.  At first she reached out to her local school, and eventually 14 other schools got involved.  Together they developed three ideas: Seeds of Hope: The resident distributed compost, small disposable pots and sunflower seeds to the 15 schools…

Herd’s Media offered their video making skills to help local people or organisations promote their business. A competition was organised. Residents nominated other residents, charities, or businesses that had helped keep everything going through the pandemic. The winner was World Shop that sells handmade, up cycled products from artisans in the Global South. Herd Media…

Mercedes Benz provided a team of 20 to help local charity Mencap with a garden makeover and decorating. They met for three hours to prepare, including making one site visit. On the day they cleaned up the pond, painted and repaired the shed, cleaned paths, weeded and fixed the fence, and painted bedrooms.

A teacher at James Rennie School serving 120 students with learning disabilities brought together 40 local people to help make the environment better for the teachers and their pupils. The project lead spent 10 hours preparing for the project and the team spent two hours on making activity boards for the pupils, painting two classrooms,…

Opening up the end of life space, a pathway between Eden Valley Hospice and Hammond’s Pond Eden Valley Hospice cares for North Cumbria’s residents whose life is cut short by illness. It neighbours but has no easy access to a beautiful park called Hammond’s Pond. One local resident wanted to change this – to open…

Between May and December 2022 the core network prototyped the Give A Day box five times. Each iteration has been adapted based on the learning from the previous. The network highlighted six learnings from Give A Day box that might help others following this way of working. 1. Keep it simple At the beginning we…

Here are some pictures of the Give a Day box as it changed at each stage of development. Note that it gets smaller. (Version 5.0 goes through a letter box) It is more focused on local connection over time. It is less cluttered. We are still learning how to make it right. Designing Box 1.0…

The design group developed the box through five iterations. The following table summarises the relationship between the content of Box 5.0 and the core of Give a Day. Element What it signifies Give a Day logo Belonging to the movement Welcome card Belonging to the movement Chocolate Gratitude & Generosity Thank you card Gratitude &…

What goes into the box. In Ratio’s work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to halve preventable deaths of children around the world, we separated out the core elements of an innovation from the adaptable elements. The core elements are what make the innovation work. The adaptable elements are what make people want to…