Our weekly round-up of interesting and outlandish information, collected from the corners of the charity sector.
Bubba Hubba
When the shock announcement came earlier this week that Sir Stephen Bubb would be stepping down as Acevo CEO later this year, an air of panic enveloped Diary’s colleagues at Civil Society News. For Bubb could always be relied upon to respond robustly whenever he disagreed with government, other sector bodies or anyone else for that matter, with quotes that were often a headline writer’s dream.
But thankfully he’s not quitting the sector - he’s not even quitting Acevo – and is going to be heading up a new governance and leadership hub with the chief executive’s body.
This has provided Diary with endless amounts of fun this week - not only because ‘hub’ rhymes with ‘Bubb’, making it fun to say, but because it is similar to the popular bubblegum brand – Hubba Bubba. This makes us think that Acevo has missed a trick calling Bubb’s new project the Charity Futures Programme, which could easily be mistaken for any of the multitude of projects looking to improve the sector’s skill-base, and should instead have called it Bubba’s Hubba.
Now there’s a charity that has really stuck to its knitting
If Brookes Newmark achieved one thing in his short term as minister for civil society, it was to really focus the nation’s attention on the importance of knitting.
It now seems that an Alzheimer’s Society branch in Somerset has been quite overwhelmed by people who have got stuck in to the knitting. The charity had asked supporters to knit forget-me-nots to mark Dementia Awareness Week and was initially hoping for 1,000, but instead received 20,000.
At the moment the knitted flowers are on display at Weston-Super-Mare’s Grand Pier. Diary doesn’t envy the volunteers who will be responsible for dismantling it – perhaps the former minister might lend a hand?
Where’s Willy
The folks over at the Directory of Social Change have produced a helpful board game designed to show how everybody benefits from charities. The idea is that people should print out the map and try to find as many things as possible that are happening because of charity.
It would be really irresponsible to suggest that it could be turned into a drinking game or darts board, which has definitely not happened at Civil Society Media Towers.
Anyway it reminds Diary of the ‘Where’s Wally’ picture-books popular with children the world over. We’ve searched high and low but can’t find the current minister, Rob Wilson, anywhere. But maybe that’s the point.
