In collaboration with my husband (@johnnybennett), I launched the Kids Draw for East Africa project last Friday on the 5050.gd platform. Utterly moved by the 50/50 call to arms, I wanted to do something to help, and our own daughter inspired the idea behind the solution.
A child is dying of hunger every six minutes in Somalia. In six minutes, a well-fed British child can paint or draw a picture that can mean the difference between life and death for someone else’s child. Kids Draw for East Africa is an online auction of kids' art.
Our daughter brings armfuls of paintings home from nursery every week and because our extended family are dispersed around the UK, most of the time they don't get to see her handiwork (apart from the occasional show and tell on Skype).
This gave us the idea that by auctioning kids' artwork online, we could give grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends the opportunity to bid on something created by their favourite little people.
It's taken three weeks to get the project up and running. John has been getting up at 5am on recent mornings to work on the site before work, creating the design and building the site in Wordpress. My efforts happen at the other end of the day once our daughter's in bed -- being a classic late night tweeter, I've been rustling up paintings from my local mummy friends, colleagues with kids and mums I know on twitter.
Take a look at
http://kidsdrawforeastafrica.org to see some truly brilliant contributions from kids aged between 2 and 7. More drawings will be added every week and who knows, you might even buy an artwork from the next generation of
YBAs (without the swear words and excessive personal information).
Now that the first batch of auctions has gone live, we're contacting the parents to get the bidding going and hope to spread the project far and wide over the next 4-6 weeks. We can't wait to see how competitive the different branches of one family can be on outbidding each other in aid of famine relief. And no parent is going to see their child's painting go for less than a fiver. It's a win/win situation…
We're also quietly nervous (and hopeful) that this project is going to snowball until we have multiple nurseries and schools involved to produce an absolute inundation of beautiful, funny and curious drawings from kids.
If you have kids and would like to take part,
find out more here. It's pretty simple: please send a photo of their drawing to
kidsdraw5050[at]
gmail[dot]com, with their first name, age and title of the drawing and we'll put it up on the gallery. We'll let you know when you can point grannies and aunts to the auction.
Go on, it's for a really good cause.
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