Afternoon for Africa Fundraiser

In April 2007, the AMURT UK team embarked on an ambitious project: a locally based fundraiser/charity awareness event which attracted over 350 people from the local community. “An Afternoon for Africa,” was concieved to support our project work in Africa, specifically Ghana. Although we support other projects throughout Africa, we wanted to keep the flavour Ghanaian. There were several reasons for the Ghana focus, not least that several of our active UK members have worked with our Ghana projects over the years. Coincidentally, our event happened not long after the 50th Ghanaian independence anniversary celebrations.

Our fears of not being able to fill the 300 seats we had allocated at Yum-Yum Thai restaurant, in Stoke Newington, in northeast London, proved to be unfounded on the day, as we actually sold over 300 tickets. The Thai cuisine was a hot favourite, as evidenced by the queues of guests around the buffet tables.

We gave informative outlines of work we're supporting in Ghana, and many present got a flavour for our grassroots development work. This was important in getting across our message, that AMURT is about inspiring change, not forcing an agenda onto the impoverished.

The raffle draw was a huge success with over 40 prizes won (whew!). Our Danish MC, Vishvashanti, had to pull out all the stops to get the lucky ticket holders united with their prizes, kindly donated by various businesses in the local area and beyond (many thanks to all those that donated).

And finally, for the closing finale, the Ghanaian five piece band, Boombaya and Paulina Oduro, let rip with some funky guitar-centred Ghanaian melodies that enticed the audience to find their dancing feet. The dance floor was largely covered in the orange AMURT volunteer T-Shirts. It was great to see our team enjoy some of the fruits of the wonderful culture we are helping to support.

The kids entertainment was also a great success in the downstairs area of the restaurant

In all we helped raise over £2500 for our Ghana projects, learned a lot about running larger events, and developed some excellent links with our local community.  A big thank you to IGNITE marketing and Yum Yum for all the help we received with the event. 

This will not be the last “Afternoon for Africa” that Stokey sees, in fact, we are going to be seeing quite a bit of the orange AMURT logo around the Hackney area in the near future.