Become a sponsor for Philanthropy in Schools

To deliver the Philanthropy in Schools programme, schools are required to secure sponsorship from an individual or organisation. This is to give participating students the opportunity to donate online and experience charitable giving first hand.

If you would like to sponsor an individual school or the wider programme, please get in touch at schools@thebiggive.org.uk. We would be delighted to hear from you!

Meet the sponsors

The sponsors are the incredible individuals who provide the funds for students to donate online during the Philanthropy in Schools programme and experience charitable giving first-hand. You can meet some of the sponsors below and read about their journeys as supporters of the programme.

Gregory Steele – Philanthropy, a personal reflection 

It was by chance that I read of the Big Give project with the Royal & Derngate Theatre in Northampton back in late 2009.  This was shortly after my wife of thirty five years had died after a brief illness and it struck a chord that, having no children, I was now feeling directionless. I couldn’t imagine what I was to do now.

Having retired early from nursing and looking forward to sharing retirement with my wife I was now drifting along and not having any particular focus. The Big Give project struck a chord with my wish to be of use to society. In my career, I had been helped along by a number of key people who had supported and believed in me and to whom I will be forever grateful. Perhaps now there is an opportunity for me to do the same for someone else.

From that single support to the Royal & Derngate I received further correspondence from the Big Give with a suggestion that I might be interested in joining the Philanthropy in Schools Project. It had started the year before, so was still in its early stages of development. It took only a short time of thinking about it before I replied and agreed to support two schools. We had a meeting of prospective philanthropists in London with the project leader and we chose two schools each to start with.

As it has turned out, only one of the schools I was offering support to has continued the project and that, to me, appears to be due to the enthusiasm of the teacher who has managed to blend the principle of philanthropy into their packed curriculum as a study subject. The age-group of the children has been set through experience at thirteen year olds in Year Nine, who have tremendous potential for using the internet to research different charities and reasoning why one of them should receive a donation rather than another. Over the last four years I have been consistently impressed with the quality of the children’s presentations and their enthusiasm for the charity chosen.

Reflecting now on my support of the Philanthropy in Schools Project, I feel that I am achieving two important goals in my life. The first is helping to give children an opportunity to think seriously about giving to charities and by donating real money through the Big Give voucher system. The second is that by supporting the project, I am able to give to a variety of charities that I might not otherwise have thought of supporting. OK, I still do have charities that I donate regularly to as well, but interestingly enough, none of these charities has appeared in the schoolchildren’s choices.

So in a final analysis, the Big Give project has made me feel as though I am making a difference across a wealth of charities without doing the hard work of researching them. The children are doing that for me. So I hope there is a ‘win-win’ situation here that Charles Handy, CBE would have approved of. I think anything that helps our younger generations to appreciate the need for philanthropy in the world is a ‘must do’ for all of us.

Jane Hulton-Harrop – Sponsor for Ormiston Chadwick Academy, October 2015

I was delighted to be given the opportunity to sponsor students so that they could take part in the exciting Big Give Philanthropy in Schools project.