Martha Payne is a 9 year old school girl from Argyll, Scotland. Martha was concerned about what children in Africa have for their school lunch so she set up a charity called “Mary’s Meals” and she and her friends sold soaps and candle holders to raise money for the charity. They raised £70 which would be enough money to feed 7 children for 1 year. To further promote her cause, Martha started a blog called “Never Seconds” with a goal of raising £7,000. Each day she would take a picture of her school lunch and add it to her blog with a few comments such as “Food-o-meter” (taste, likeability), “Mouthfuls”, “Courses”, “Health rating”, “Cost” and “Pieces of Hair”. School children around the world responded by sending in pictures of their school lunches with the same critique format.
By the time she raised £2000 some pencil-necked bureaucrat on the city council decided she was simply too successful and banned her from taking any more pictures of her lunches.
Soon, news that she had been banned appeared in newspapers around the world and her story went viral on the internet. Due to worldwide publicity, as well as some pressure from a local politician, the ban on Martha taking pictures of her school lunches was lifted. As of this writing Martha’s “Never Seconds” blog has over 4,080,000 page views and has raised over £50,000 for Mary’s Meals.
Here is an excerpt from Forbes Magazine on Martha’s efforts:
The background is quite simple. Martha Payne is a 9 year old girl from Argyll in Scotland. As a little project she started a blog called Never Seconds. So called because it is about the meals she receives at school and one of the rules is that you can never have an extra portion: what we Brits call “seconds”. It would be comforting to think that the system had been horrifed by Oliver Twist’s “Please Sir, may I have some more” and determined to make sure that no child was left hungry after their first portion. But no, the obesity panic has gone so far that no school child can ever be allowed a second plate of anything for any reason: not even a missed breakfast.
The blog was essentially Martha talking about her school lunches, with photographs of them (when she remembered her camera, the battery didn’t die, she went to school and so on). There was a side line in raising money for a local charity called Mary’s Meals. This raises money to provide school lunches to the poor in places like Africa. The blog gained some popularity running through a million hits quite quickly.
So far, so quirky and the sort of thing that is happening out there thousands of times a week among us hundreds of millions on these here intertubes. Then the school bureaucracy realised what she was doing and decided to ban her from taking the photos of her lunches. They had quite clearly never heard of the Streisand Effect, the idea that attempting to prevent someone from disseminating information on the internet just makes everyone decide to look out for that very information. Popularises exactly what you didn’t want anyone to find out.
You can read the entire Forbes article here.
Martha’s Never Seconds Blog can be found here.
Hat tip: Mrs. Huckfunn
Bunch of useless bureaucrats.
http://www.change.org/petitions/argyll-and-bute-council-lift-the-ban-on-the-never-seconds-blog-about-school-dinners
Petition urging the council to change their decision.
mfhorn wrote:
Thanks for posting the petition. This is a great feel good story. I just love it when some snotty bureaucrat picks on someone they perceive as vulnerable and then gets their lunch
handed to them. Since I posted this yesterday, the page views for Mary’s Meals has gone from 4,080,000 to 4,737,800 and the money raised has gone from just over £50,000 to £61,439. That’s over $96,000, most of it coming after the doofus banned her from taking pictures and in just 2 days. GOOD FOR YOU MARY AND KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
I just don’t ‘get’ why they don’t want pictures of school meals posted. We all know school food isn’t the greatest stuff you’ll find. So why are they getting so worked up?
Awesome job there Mary! You’re already wiser than many in the political class.
Great post, keep up the good work!
The site for getting advice on raising money for charity is http://www.find-funds.co.uk/
Find Funds Fundraising
Fundraising consultants West Midland
Fundraising Consultants Birmingham
mfhorn wrote:
I think it’s the problem that we see with bureaucrats everywhere. On top of not having enough useful work to keep themselves busy, many of them have an officious, over-inflated view of their importance. Many think that a large part of their job is telling the public “NO!”
Ranjitkhanna05 wrote:
Thanks for the good words and the links. A good link for deciding on which charities to donate to is Charity Navigator. They have a fairly comprehensive review of many of the better known charities. I can’t remember where I read it, but supposedly a charity should commit no more than 15% of the funds given for items such as promotions, overhead and salaries.
@ huckfunn:
Yeah, that 15% is a figure pretty close to what I use as a rule of thumb.
I had one of those groups call me from the Highway Patrol or some similar group call me asking for a donation and I asked how much would actually get to the group that was raising money. He seemed proud that a whole 25% would get there. I didn’t donate.
huckfunn wrote:
Yea, good luck finding one like that, most have overhead expenditures in the 70 percent range.
Oh, and also a big ‘thumbs up’ to the young lady whose blog is doing such a great job of helping Mary’s Meals, ‘Martha’, from Scotland and her blog ‘NeverSeconds’.
mfhorn wrote:
He probably was proud of that figure. I quit giving to organized charities once I discovered 70 to 85 percent overhead was the norm.
doriangrey wrote:
99 percent of all organized charities exist for one solitary reason, and it isn’t to help the poor, downtrodden or those suffering from a catastrophe.
They exist to make those individuals who administer them profoundly wealthy, to grant them a special social status and grant them a extraordinary assertion to moral superiority.
Performing act’s of charity are merely the vehicle that fulfills their desires, it is not the end goal, only the means to achieve their end goal. That’s why overhead cost’s are so mind bogglingly high and so small a percentage of the money collected ever actually goes to the charity’s supposed recipients.
mfhorn wrote:
Indeed, God Bless Martha, who is doing this not for wealth, fame or a sense of moral superiority, but because of the innocent naivety of a child, she honestly believes she can help those less fortunate than herself.
@ doriangrey:
I don’t know that I’d call her ‘naive’ at all.
@ doriangrey:
The Charity Navigator website does a great job of ranking charities. You can see both how much of what they raise actually gets where it’s supposed to, and how ‘transparent’ they are. Yes, there are far too many charities that aren’t very efficient or who are secretive, but there are plenty that do a great job with what’s contributed.
I won’t even look at anyone with fewer than 3 of 4 stars.