As the wave of bedazzling, sequin-studded, celebrity-saturated evening television has indicated, we are hurtling headfirst into the season of charitable giving. With Channel 4’s Stand Up To Cancer dominating its output in a glitzy ball of innuendo, stand-up smorgasbords and an unhealthy amount of Alan Carr, and the BBC’s Children in Need coverage further inflating countless TV-personalities, the spirit of philanthropy is tangibly in the air.
This tidal wave of good will has got me reminiscing about my own experience of working in the formidable Third Sector. Although only short, my recent time spent as a fundraising officer for a fantastic NGO called Link Community Development International was punctuated mainly by a great deal of stress, emailing, organising emails, post-it notes, stress, emergency chocolate runs, leafleting, stress, being moved on from leafleting and more stress. My eyes were well and truly wrenched open to the sheer, raw effort that must be poured into every crevice of charity work to stand any chance of making a difference.
My very own baptism of altruistic fire centred on the organisation, marketing and logistical implementation of the single greatest charity fun-run to ever grace planet earth. Or, when not being overblown to entice participants, a 5k charity fun-run around Battersea Park in inflatable sumo suits, a.k.a The Sumo Run. After months of tireless campaigning, characterised largely by donning my own sumo suit to run through the streets and tube lines of central London, showering a reluctant public with leaflets and marketing spiels, arguing with portaloo companies and producing enough GANT charts to wallpaper a small bungalow, finally, on July 27th 2014, the day of the Sumo Run dawned…
In order to understand the following account, one must remember that The Sumo Run had been entirely orchestrated, organised, realised (and in my case, compere-ed) by myself and only two colleagues, over the space of just four short months. Luckily, we had managed to graft in a bit of extra support from the charity’s Edinburgh office on the day, which was much appreciated as we arrived in the centre of Battersea Park to find a gridlocked mess of vans, portaloos, disassembled marquees, banners, sumo suits and miles of microphone lead. The setting for the run’s start-line was the ornate bandstand in the park’s centre, with the sumos having to complete two laps of the 2.5k course, looping around the southern half. With our crack team, the marquees, sound system and other essential elements were constructed in an efficient and successful manner, hopefully setting the tone for the rest of the day.
This illusion was shattered the second I remembered an essential component of my compere duty that I had unfortunately overlooked – the warm-up routine. When the concept of a warm-up routine had initially been suggested to me, I had engaged my default reaction to any undertaking that requires organisation and/or strategic planning – an expert melange of procrastination and hoping for the best. A month on, and a great deal of entirely forgetting had been added to the mix. Assuring my professional superiors with an overly sycophantic smile that all was taken care of, I made a hasty exit over to the bandstand, dragging one of the volunteers along with me.
After several anxious minutes of aimlessly flicking switches on the PA system, we finally managed to locate the perfect work-out song. Acting as a seamless team, between the two of us we managed to assemble a routine that Mr Motivator would have sold his entire collection of ethnic-print leotards for, through a process of shouting cliched aerobic moves at each other and raking them into some kind of logical order. I’d love to say we then memorised the routine to the very last star-jump, but in reality we scrawled each sequence of steps on an A2 sheet with a sharpie and frantically duct taped it to the floor at the front of the bandstand.
This achieved, it was time to get into character and sumo suit up. Looking around from under the brim of my culturally insensitive sumo hair hat, I noticed a worrying lack of race participants. Instead, the vast majority of the people milling around the bandstand area appeared to have attended in a purely press capacity, made apparent by their accompanying cameras, tripods, booms and video equipment. At that point, I pondered to myself that the only thing worse than putting on a charity fun-run with no runners, was putting on a charity fun-run with no runners and being photographed and filmed doing so for various national news publications…
A few moments of deep concern later, and things appeared to be looking up. For a start, a considerable crowd of (about seven) sumos had rocked up looking vaguely enthusiastic and were registering at marquee number one, and I had finally worked out how to use the PA microphone. Mildly unsettling however, was the fact that at least four of the sumos who had shown up appeared to be sporting Union Jack paraphernalia, as well as top-hats, monocles and in one case, a Prince Charles mask. I was left wondering if I had ill-advisedly timed the run to coincide with a significant national holiday. More pressing however, was that considering I now had a working microphone and (albeit small) crowd, it was time for me to begin compere-ing. At this point, I took a second to look deep within myself for ideas as to how to compere a novelty fun-run. Unfortunately, experience was not on my side, and so I elected to start by yelling “HELLOOOOOO SUMOOOOOSSSS!’ into the mic, which was accompanied by a sudden screech of feedback.
As more sumo runners materialised, I began to settle into the routine of shouting insincere welcomes and insanely dull health and safety requirements at every new group. However, my national holiday concerns had only swelled with the arrival of more patriotically dressed sumos. At that moment, an awful realisation dawned on me. A few months before, when the three members of the Link London office were still deep within the organisational hell stage of Sumo Run planning, out of sheer delirium and desperation to create ‘pre-race hype’ for early sign-ups, myself and a colleague had come up with a half-baked scheme to hold a fancy dress contest. For the theme, we’d taken inspiration from the 2014 World Cup, and gone with the multi-cultural idea of ‘national dress’. In a move that I would regret for quite some time, I had drafted this concept into a strongly branded email, scheduled it to send to all race participants, and intended to sleep on the idea and most probably delete the email the next morning when common sense had taken hold. Guess what. I forgot. I then realised two very important details: 1. The email had only been sent to those signed up at the time, omitting a good 3/4 of the overall participants. 2. Although I had had visions of the cosmopolitan, melting pot that is London offering runners of endless diverse ethnicities, the vast majority of the city’s inhabitants consider themselves to be British. And the result looked like a poorly-attended, novelty BNP demonstration. ‘This is going to be a complete car crash,’ I mourned to myself, before the sumos’ sudden stares and raucous laughter, accompanied by the sombre head shaking of my colleagues alerted me to the fact I had not lowered the mic from my mouth before my verbally expressed moment of weakness.
Luckily, I could not dwell on this for too long, as it was time for the eagerly-anticipated ‘mass inflation’. This involved all runners gathering in front of the bandstand wearing their deflated suits, before all flicking on the inflate switches together. A visual spectacle I am sure you’ll agree. Gathering the sumos was not too much of an issue, with such a compact crowd to work. However, the mass inflation was proving to be quite the money-shot for most of the press bods, as they gathered at the front of the bandstand with their electrical storm of equipment, completely obscuring myself and my two warm-up assistants from view. A few minutes of intense negotiation resulted in them refusing to back down, and so I retreated to the centre of the bandstand, mic in hand, and began to address the sumo crowd in my patented Saturday night TV manner – “Ok Sumos!! Is everybody re-” I began, but was curtailed due to a piercing scream of feedback, caused by the numerous other microphones being wielded by the press gang. A couple more attempts produced similar results, until, in the absence of any other ideas, I resorted to simply bellowing over the top of the noise.
By the grace of God and my unholy threats, the press gang conceded to move away from the bandstand as we began the warm-up routine. Looking hurriedly at my duct taped routine sheet, and then to the sky for inspiration, I pressed play on the sound system.
What followed were four of the most perfect minutes I have ever experienced, the kind where time seems to stand still in a moment of distilled clarity, and the stars align to make a undue success of every endeavour. The routine worked perfectly, the sumos were cheering, dancing, hugging and laughing, I managed to emulate every 90s home work-out video with my encouraging stock phrases and cheesy enthusiasm… In a moment of extreme high spirits, I even threw in the patented ‘say-what-and-squat’ move once enjoyed by my housemates at uni from our shared Ministry of Sound aerobics DVD. As the song ended, I felt a sweeping sense of euphoria and renewed faith in my ability to blag my way through things. Just as the routine wound to a close, the sumos applauded and I congratulated them on their supreme athletic efforts, a colleague, high on the atmosphere I can only assume, yelled at me from the side of the stage “get them to twerk!!!” This terrible advice should have been ignored under normal circumstances, but floating blissfully on my personal cloud of success, I yelled “twerk with me sumos!” It doesn’t take much imagination to visualise the haunting image of me, dressed as a sumo, bending over and shakin’ my ass like Miley while the crowd watched on in horror and confusion. But here’s their reaction in visual form anyway:
Thankfully, the race needed to start. Due to the fact that the course was two laps of the park’s southern half, the sumos were all required to pass through the bandstand area between laps, as well as to end their run. Using a system devised that very morning, we had agreed to control the flow of sumos by channelling those who’d finished in one direction, and those with a lap still to complete in another. Implementing this system was easy, requiring only two interns holding arrows. After several sumos had completed their first lap and confusedly jogged off in the wrong direction, I decided to conduct a quick quality check of the directional signs, and found one intern holding his upside down.
As the race wore on, my voice began to wear thin from the constant screams of encouragement as an endless flow of sumos charged towards me. After a while, I began to realise that those who had finished the race were becoming pretty restless. With only the promise of a beautiful and poignant prize-giving ceremony at the end of the race stopping them from packing up and going home, I felt compelled to entertain my sumo audience, but had no idea how. At that point, my attention was taken by a group of young and enthusiastic members of the press-gang, claiming that they were from ‘the Welsh version of T4.’ Whatever that is. Welsh T4 were wondering if I could possibly turn off the blaring soundtrack of recent chart hits that had been embellishing the proceedings thus far, so that they could film a segment for their Saturday morning show. Stupidly flattered that representatives of Welsh youth had deemed my poxy run interesting enough to cover, I complied with their wishes. What I hadn’t anticipated however, was that the growing gaggle of finished sumo runners, who were standing around, waiting for something to happen, would mistake the sudden lack of music as an invitation to gather around the bandstand, eagerly anticipating the start of the prize-giving ceremony. Instead, they were met with me awkwardly grinning for an uncomfortable amount of time, mic in hand, until a kindly volunteer rescued me and explained to the expectant sumos that the sudden silence was solely in aid of Welsh youth media.
Eventually, lord only knows how, all sumos had completed the race and managed to gather once more at the front of the bandstand for the grande finale. Before the general handing out of medals to one and all, we first had three very special prizes (commemorated by giant, inflatable trophies) to bequeath. First came the actual winner of the race, then the ‘best dressed sumo’, who was pretty much the only fancy-dressed runner to have deviated from Union Jack chic, and finally the serious prize of ‘top fundraiser’. Just after having shaken hands earnestly with Steven, who I had been informed only seconds earlier by a member of the team had raised a staggering amount more than anyone else, another volunteer leant over the side of the bandstand and frantically whispered to me that they had made a mathematical error – the real top fundraiser was actually the girl who i had just named the best dressed.
Once that awkward situation had been rectified as gallantly as possible, the sumos filed up across the bandstand to receive their well-earned medals. Unfortunately, the staggering amount of cabling and wires that we had failed to untangle that morning and had left trailing across the bandstand floor proved too much of an obstacle to one particularly tired runner, causing what can only be described as a seven-sumo pile up, also including a small child and mangy looking dog, which had appeared from nowhere at the most inopportune of moments.
Before any sumos could threaten to sue-mo, we drew the event to a hasty close, hurriedly thanking all participants for their support as we ushered them towards the baggage tent and out of the park. As much of a farcical disaster as the day had been, money had been raised for those who truly need it, and that alone made the months of emailing, action plans and frenetically conducted leafleting more than worthwhile.
