If you think poor sanitation is bang out of order, we have a mission for you –
should you choose to accept it.
Tired of being branded as bed-hogging tutorial-dodgers? We
know students are game-changers and world-shakers – and we have the evidence to
prove it.
A group of students at the University of Warwick (including, Jess Docherty, right) went all
out for toilets in their final year – and twinned almost 50 toilets in the
Students’ Union. Others at Bristol and Durham universities also kicked
student stereotypes into touch by raising awareness and dosh for dunnies.
So, inspired by their example, we went straight to the
bathroom – birthplace of all great ideas – and emerged with the germ of a big
new idea. (No, no, that’s a good thing, not a cause for soap.)
So here’s the
challenge: create a twinning team, twin lots of toilets at your place of study
and make yours a Toilet Twinned University or College.
In the next few weeks, we can send you a student pack
containing all the info and resources you need to start twinning. There’ll also be advice on our website and we’re always on
hand to help you with everything from setting up on social media to getting
into the local papers.
Register your interest by emailing us on fundraising@toilettwinning.org (Sadly, we can’t send
you cake, though.)
Crib sheets
To whet your appetite, let us show you what’s possible when a handful of
students get passionate about toilets…
The Warwick Toilet
Twinning team were a small but perfectly formed group of five students who
blended creativity, puns and some wacky ideas in a year-long fundraising
campaign.
To mark
World Toilet Day (November 19), they organised a Big Squat – which involved a
relay team of students squatting for 12 hours solid in the main campus piazza.
Other events included a cake bake (above), a second-hand clothes sale and an ‘Apoostic
Night’ when musician friends gave their time at a fundraising gig.
Jess and
Emily even dressed up as toilets (right) to collect spare change, laying their
reputations on the line for the noble cause of twinning. ‘We were very loud on
social media to the point where people knew us as “those toilet people”,’ says
Emily.
But the cause
made it all worthwhile, says Jess. ‘We are both genuinely passionate about
international development so that made us want to give time to it. And people
were very generous…’
Meanwhile, students from Bristol University's School of Geographical
Sciences raised more than £360 at their annual Globe Ball to link their loo
with a latrine in Burundi.
And students at Durham University twinned toilets in ten of
its colleges after student Lis Martin fired up her friends to tackle the poor
sanitation she’d experienced first-hand in Africa with Tearfund. At Lis’s
prompting, the Student Union passed a motion to twin a toilet from each college
with a loo in Burundi – then the Charities Committee and Lis organised a ‘rag
raid’ on the streets of Edinburgh, which raised £600.
Join us?
So you really can change the world, one toilet at a time.
And if you sign up some mates to help you, you can achieve a whole lot more.
It’s the same principle that Toilet Twinning follows at
grassroots level: we bring people in poor communities together to decide what
they want and how they are going to achieve it.
And a Toilet Twinned University or Toilet Twinned College
campaign will work best when you form a team, pull together and get busy with
those toilet puns. Think about it: if you twin lots of toilets, you can
transform life for an entire village. Forever.
Definitely worth getting out of
bed for… even after a long night, erm, in the library.
