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| GWR update | |
| The good news is that yes we did set a new world record for the most people dressed as Superheroes in one location (505).The bad news is that unfortunatley we only held the record for about 7 weeks.A superhero themed half marathon based in the US doubled [More] | |
| Passingiton and The Brighton Marathon 2010 | |
| We have 15 golden Bond places for next years Brighton Marathon on Sunday 18th April. There are two ways you can support our passingiton marathon team. Firstly by actually joining the passingiton marathon team and running the race. Secondly by joining the [More] | |
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About us
About us - Who makes up team passingiton.
passingiton is run on a purely voluntary basis. Nobody in passingiton gets paid which is one of the reasons for so much of the money getting to where it's needed most.
James
James is one of the two co-founders and leads the team in a well meaning but possibly quite kamikaze style, a style that ensures things get done. He talks to a lot of people, always gets over excited and often refuses to take off his Batman suit for several days after an event. It's Jame's unwavering enthusiasm and sometimes unrealistic expectations that drives passingiton to consistantly punch above our weight.
Matt
Matt is the other charity founder, likes drawing, painting and designing (it's the day job). He is responsible for all the charity's artwork. He's also got a knack for working incessantly on the minor details.
Matt's the one that tells James how bad his dreamy ideas are, only to be standing side by side with him seeing them through a couple of months later.
Jezz
Jezz joined the team in 2006 and although he has recently moved on to work on his own charity initiatives he has been an enormous support to passingiton and its projects in a number of ways. He basically rebuilt and maintained the charity website for 3 years and will hopefully always be on call to lead our HEROES RUN, giant bunny suit style if and when we need him to.
Mark
Mark is one of our trustees and joined the team in 2007 and now does a number of very grown up jobs including advising us on how best to set up our accounts and establish networks in the African countries we support. He's also happy to get dressed up as a Thunderbird and lead 1,000 people in a spur of the moment warm up.
Niki
Niki clicks her mouse a lot and acts as the welcome party to all spontaneous or disorganised runners in the race entry tent. She's a writer, so one day that will come in handy. She likes to give her opinion, boss the boys about (they need it), and tries to squeeze herself into a wonderwoman costume once a year.
Debs
Debs has her own PR agency (Forward PR) and has been helping the boys get the charity noticed since 2006. She also makes superb post race cakes and her "Penelope's Pit Stop" has become one of the main reason that most men aged 18 to 45 attend our HEROES RUN.
Kev
Kev is the brains behind The "Ruck over rugby Rugby 7's event that this year raised money for passingiton and Breakthrough Breast Cancer. He basically took Jim's passingiton social 7's 2008 tournament and well basically made it much better and in doing so has now created an event that will not only become a major highlight of the Sussex Sporting calendar but will hopefully go on to raise lots of money for lots of different charities. He's also really good at loading and unloading Luton Vans full of bottled water at 5am in the rain when no one else really wants to.
Neil
Neil is one of our trustees and the elder statesman of the team who as well as being Jim's Dad edits and checks a lot of the paperwork and is also our main link with the charity commission. Also what he doesn't know about Luton Van tail lifts isn't really worth knowing.
Chris
Chris is our accountant and Matt's Dad. He's also very happy to run 10k in a back to front Superman costume whenever asked.
Sophia
Sophia joined the team this year after volunteering with the team on our trip to the Gambia to set up project 3. With a First class degree in architecture, sophie will be invaluable to the team now that we are starting to become more involved in the building side of our projects. Matt's younger cousin and about half his body weight, she can still drink more beer than he can.
Pippa
Pippa lives in Accra, Ghana and is our main link with The Dreamland School. She runs a number of Fitness centres out there and along with the support of her staff is helping the Dreamland project to run smoothly. She is also very good at flying into town, all the way from Ghana just to run our HEROES RUN.
Emma
Emma spends a lot of her time flying around the world as part of her job. She is now our main link with Tenderfoot project and recently created the updated Development plan. She also has been known to fly in from the tropics to chuck on the Lycra and do some Superhero running herself.
Where does all the money go?
It's a natural enough question and one we feel deserves an answer.
You often hear that when you give to a charity only a small percentage of the money gets to the cause that you're donating to. The extent to which this is true depends upon the specific charity that you are talking about. In the case of passingiton all (or at the very least almost all) of the money goes direct to the causes in Africa and here is how we do it.
Firstly, nobody at passingiton gets paid. This is not because we are incredibly mean but because we are all involved on a voluntary basis.
Secondly, we keep our costs down by doing as much of the work as we can ourselves. For example Matt does the design work,Jim does the content and between them they both put the website together.
Thirdly, we work very hard to try and make sure that all expenses are covered by any event sponsorship that we receive (and we beg, steal and borrow as much as we possibly can!). In this way the maximum amount of money can go straight towards our projects in Africa.
We will always have expenses; runners will always want a momento for completing the run, we will always need to make sure we are insured in case someone gets hurt, and if we don't advertise our events nobody will take part and so we won't raise any money. We also need to check out that the projects we support are legitimate before sending thousands of pounds to foreign bank accounts. It's not rocket science, but there again what is?
We do a lot of things, and other people do a lot of things for us. These are things that we think you should know about, or at least have the chance to know about.
The big problem we've had with this is knowing how to present it to you. What we really needed was some sort of scrapbook, so we made one and here it is.
Like all good scrapbooks it will be added to, and we've already got plans on improving it.
For the moment you can browse the calendar section of our scrapbook or read our diary. In the calendar you can browse through the years and have a look at some of the things that have been going on or are planned for the future (dates with events are highlighted and dates with multiple events are highlighted in a different colour). The diary lets you read through events a month at a time.
We're even trying to show you pictures of as many of these as we can. To do this we're using picture browsers like the one on the right.
Our friends
Although the day to day running of passingiton is down to a small group of people much of the success of the charity has been down to our friends being there when it matters.Some of them have been with us from the beginning, others have been and gone, all of them have helped change lives.
We're working on a way of acknowledging as many of these people and companies as possible and if you are one of them we hope that this will be enough to show that we haven't forgotten you.
You all know who you are and you all know what you've done. We're confident that you'll all prefer us to be spending our time on the projects in Africa than trying to create a list of all the people who've helped and offending the one or two people who are bound to slip our minds.
