Every 6 seconds a child dies of hunger.

1 billion children in the world live in poverty (every second child).

Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.

Statistics from GlobalIssues.org

Across the planet, millions of people in the developing world will die today because of poverty, ill health and lack of a basic education.

It’s frustrating because there are good people out there trying to help.

They need money.

I couldn’t bear not doing anything so I started 7 Wonders in 7 Days to make a difference.

The plan: to raise £777,000 for 7 charities by visiting the new 7 wonders of the world in 7 days.

Join me. If we are successful in raising £777,000, it will allow the 7 charities I am fundraising for to effect real change in tackling poverty, ill health and lack of a basic education in some of the poorest countries in the world.

And in the developed world, the money goes towards researching a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias and treating mental health problems in young people.

I’m also looking for 7 lucky people to join me on the 7 Wonders in 7 Days trip later this year.

I don’t need your money… just yet.

All I need you to do is sign up to do some free stuff to change a life.

1. The first is simple: change your picture on Facebook or Twitter to change a life by wearing our Twibbon.
2. Then  join our mailing list and you’ll be first to know when you can win a free 3 day holiday to join me on the incredible 7 wonders in 7 days trip. UPDATE: You can now enter the competitions to join me on the trip.

The small print:
By signing up, you are agreeing to be contacted to do some more free stuff to change a life.

Whatever I’ll ask you to do is always 100% free, legal and clean. It will be things like making a YouTube video or sharing something on Facebook or Twitter.  You are free to opt out at any time.

Get involved, please.  This is not a game.

7 Wonders in 7 Days Can Save 7 million lives

Thank you.

If you have any questions or queries about any of this, please leave a comment after this post.

Image credit: lboudouani.files.wordpress.com

Regular readers of this blog will know that on Monday I held a closed invite Tweetup to thank supporters of 7 Wonders in 7 Days and members of Team 7 Wonders for their help with the campaign so far.

It was also an opportunity to share some of my fundraising plans for the campaign going forward after July’s decision to postpone the trip from September 2009 (9/09/09) to October 2010 (10/10/10) to allow enough time to involve more people in the campaign and raise the funds needed to go.

At Monday’s Thank you Tweetup, held at the Living Room on Deansgate, the venue for June’s Charity Auction and Tweetup, myself and the six five that could make it from Team 7 Wonders discussed my plans for 7 Wonders in 7 Days including the vision and strategy behind the campaign itself.

Thank You to All That Contributed

I’m really grateful to Julian Tait (@julianlstar), David Eaton (@_peak), Hwa Young Jung (@hwayoung) Josh R (@technicalfault) and Ricky Chotai (@ricky_chotai) for their frank questioning and fantastic ideas on Monday evening.

The discussion about the vision at the heart of 7 Wonders in 7 Days, which is to start an educational foundation in memory of my grandmother whose death from Alzheimer’s inspired the whole trip reminded me how important it is to “keep the main thing, the main thing”.

The Jessie Ekweozor Memorial Foundation is being created to do charitable work with disadvantaged young people both in the UK and in the Nigerian village where my grandmother lived most of her life.

Work on creating and registering this charitable foundation is underway.

Julian has extensive experience of starting charities.  His detailed questioning of how the foundation in memory of my gran was to be set up and what it was going to do made it apparent that setting up a charitable organisation is not for the faint hearted.

More importantly, the potentially time consuming process meant that it was possible that the charity may not be registered in time to raise funds for it through the trip in October 2010, meaning that the main reason for this year’s trip postponement could rear its ugly head again next year.

This realisation presented me with a tough decision to make.

I could decide to soldier on, shouldering the burden of raising funds for 7 Wonders in 7 Days and starting a charity from scratch (with some help from my parents, I must add)

or

I could select a ‘substitute charity’, one that had mutual aims to the educational foundation my parents envisioned in memory of my gran, and already existed.

I would then replace the yet-to-be-registered Jessie Ekweozor Memorial Foundation with this substitute charity in the line up of charities being supported by 7 Wonders in 7 Days, the aim being to raise £111,000 for this charity through the 7 Wonders in 7 Days trip instead.

Thanks to Josh for suggesting this.

A Tough Decision To Make

I spent a great deal of time thinking about this over the last 48 hours and have come to the decision that it is much wiser to select a new 7th Charity.

The reasoning behind this is to move as quickly as possible to the fundraising stage for 7 Wonders in 7 Days.

By this I mean moving on to being able to fund raise online for each of the charities using online donations platforms provided by the charities themselves or by sites like Just Giving.com.

Avoiding Embarrassment by Not Soldiering On

A very likely potential snag if I soldiered on with trying to create the charity as well as fundraise was the embarrassment of approaching corporate sponsors with a list of charities that is less than credible because one of them is not yet registered with the Charity Commission.

This was reason enough to choose a new, already established seventh charity.

Which Charity Did I Choose?

After some thought, I have picked Comic Relief as the  new 7th Charity and will be supporting them by raising £111,000 for in support of Sport Relief 2010.

Basically, I am replacing my grandmother’s yet to be created foundation with Comic Relief in the line up of the 7 charities I am fundraising for through 7 Wonders in 7 Days.

This decision allows me to go ahead with the trip in October 2010 even if my grandmother’s foundation is not yet registered by then.

Tough Decision Raises Profile of Foundation Being Created In Memory Of My Gran

Though a tough decision to make, the added benefit of pursuing the 7 Wonders in 7 Days challenge by raising £777,000 for 7 existing charities is that I’d be better equipped to fundraise and raise the profile of the foundation being created in memory of my gran after a successful 7 Wonders in 7 Days campaign.

I have contacted Sport Relief about my plans and will also be contacting the other 6 charities with details of the next stage of the 7 Wonders in 7 Days campaign.

The specific sporting activity I will be doing to raise funds for in support of Sports Relief via 7 Wonders in 7 Days is a weekly mile run at Manchester’s Sportcity running track which I will be blogging, Twittering about and occasionally YouTubing.

Though I once played football for the Women’s FA (I played for Harlow Town Women’s Football Club during my industrial placement year whilst studying Electronic Engineering at York University), I’m not a big fan of long distance running (aka running for the sake of running) so that’s going to be a challenge.

I’m also working on other fundraising plans for the other 6 charities.

Important Changes to Fundraising Plans

My fundraising for the 7 Wonders in 7 Days travel fund is also going to change after Monday’s discussions.

After a frank discussion about the way the 7 Wonders in 7 Days campaign appeared to some as a ‘7 Day Jolly’ it was suggested that I scrap the ‘Invite a Donor to join me on the trip idea’ and instead focus on finding a way to fund just me going through in kind donations, working with the airlines directly.

I’ll keep you posted on this and other plans.

In the mean time, expect to see the look of the 7 Wonders in 7 Days website change as the 7 charities I have chosen to support are given prominence in the design of the website.

I will also be changing much of the copy of the website to reflect these new plans.

What do you think?

Should I have ditched fundraising for the charity being started in memory of my gran so quickly?

Your comments, queries and questions welcomed as always.

UPDATE – 11th September 2009:

The Fundraising Team organising Sport Relief 2010 have been in touch and I’m pleased to say things are moving in an encouraging direction.

I am retrospectively changing the wording of ‘raising support for Sport Relief” in this blog post to ensure it is in keeping with how it should be presented.  Activity is being done ‘in support of Sport Relief 2010′.

I’m also replacing the Sport Relief logo with a substitute image (credited below) until I receive the official images for Sport Relief 2010.

Image Credit: Sport Relief.com MetaphorEvents.co.uk

Temporarily decamped to the quirky building in Manchester’s academic heartland, this month’s Social Media Cafe Manchester took place as part of Futuresonic, the yearly festival of music, events and ideas which is currently front of mind for every hacker, geek, and social media lover in the region!

Here are my slides. You can also download them from Slideshare.

Note that these are not the exact slides I presented. I’ve tidied them up to get rid of a duplicate page(!), added hyperlinks to URLs and clarified some bullet points.

During my talk, which happened in the second of the two sessions at the unconference-style event, (I arrived after the start of the first because I was waiting for a taxi!), I got a number of really good suggestions for the project which really drove home the importance of the Social Media Cafe for Manchester’s creative and developer community.  But more on that in a minute.

Here are the ideas, some of which came out during the informal chat after my presentation.

I jotted them as soon as I could at the event but probably forgot some. If you heard my talk and suggested something I haven’t mentioned please leave a comment as I need all the help I can get!

I’ve also tried to credit each idea by including a Twitter screen name when I can. If you were there and see your suggestion without your (Twitter) name, leave me a comment with your screen name and a reminder of your idea!

If I attributed your idea to someone else, please shout out!

• Reduce the Trip Itinerary from Thomas Cook’s current suggestion of 10 days to 7 by linking up with a Geography department at one of universities in Greater Manchester, perhaps even Manchester University. By Rachael Howarth @rachaelhowarth

• Consider an alternative or back up trip itinerary in case flights are missed, suggested by Josh R aka @technicalfault. This could potentially be with Star Alliance or some other global airline network.

• Contact a mobile operator and request a World Roaming SIM card to save money on calls whilst abroad. Suggested by Ricky Chotai @ricky_chotai.

• Find a way for developers to get involved to simplify the technical side of running the project. Perhaps by running an iPhone App competition. Suggested by Perry Bonewell @pbonewell. This is something I’ve given some thought, actually, more on this soon.

• Approach the makers of video game Rock Band for sponsorship by offering to play their game at each country visited.   This was jointly posed by Alan Holding @brokendrum70, @technicalfault, @grayle and @ricky_chotai.

This funny idea morphed into contacting Nintendo and offering to play Wii Tennis on my travels by serving a shot (is that what they call them?) in one country and maintaining the rally in others.

I chipped in and giggled and contributed and it eventually became what I think is a powerful iPhone app idea: Cross Country Tennis.

I will expand on this after listing the other ideas!

• The Living Post Card – aka the Chi-chiGram! No funny business though.  The idea is to deliver a special message to someone at each country. Idea by @brokendrum70, cheeky name by @technicalfault.  Sensible one by yours truly.

• Approach TV documentary producers to ask for a ‘covering film crew’. There is more and more interest in programmes like this and Dave Gorman’s travelling documentary is an example, as suggested by Richard Hudson @RichardHudson.

• Run a competition for a Someone Once Told Me (SOTM) picture taken with someone at one of the 7 countries. This came out of a conversation with Mario Cacciottolo aka @marioSOTM who runs the popular social photo site and is in Manchester because he is speaking at Futuresonic 2009.

Mario also offered a very special SOTM prize for what will become one of the first 7 Wonders In 7 Days charity auctions.   I’m keeping this under wraps for now but I can’t wait to share it when the time is right!

Back to Cross Country Tennis:

The idea for this iPhone app is to allow iPhone users (and Android phone users, hopefully) an opportunity to play a game with my geo-location(!) as the trip progresses.

Basically the idea is that your iPhone playing a game of tennis (or another game of your choosing) with you using updates of my location as a trigger.

The game starts when I leave the country and my geo-location changes. The game/app would then appear to have served and kick-started a game of tennis, for example.

It’s your move now; you must return the serve before you receive my next geo-location update or you lose the point!

And so on… The game you are playing can be changed to say, a penalty shoot out in football or round of golf or a session of clay pigeon shooting.

Whatever… The idea is you play and when I move from one location to another, I play.

We also briefly talked about cricket and rugby but I don’t get those games so can’t elaborate.

The way this game developed in the space of a few minutes epitomised how important the Social Media Cafe Manchester has become as a platform for sharing ideas and getting feedback about projects at an early stage.

This is something that Francois Nel @francoisnel and Steve Matthewson @stevematthewson and I discussed much later sat by the Contact Theatre bar.

It’s amazing to think that at just over 6 months old, the Social Media Cafe is providing such an important and previously overlooked role in nurturing new ideas in Manchester’s digital sector.

Another chat with Caleb Storkey, founder of Freedoma, the newly launched social-media powered local business directory was another case in point.

An opportunity to share ideas spawned a slew of fertile ideas.

The Futuresonic festival proved a fitting setting for all this cross pollination.

I will explore the ideas listed above in coming weeks on this site/blog. Stay tuned.

Please add any additions or others you may have in the comments. Many thanks in advance!

Still to come on the site is a lot more social media integration. Flickr, FriendFeed, Last.fm… Will be really good when it’s done.

As I said at the end of my presentation, I need your help to get the 7 Wonders in 7 Days project off the ground so if you haven’t already, please cast your eye over this itinerary suggested by Thomas Cook Manchester and help me reduce it from 10 to 7 days!

Thank you!

I hope you’ve come to help!

As you may know already, I am planning to visit all 7 (new) wonders of the world in 7 days in September 2009, with the goal of raising £777,000 for 7 amazing charities.

Before I can even start, I need your help.

The lovely World Travel team at Thomas Cook travel agents, Manchester have put together a travel itinerary for the trip, covering just flights for now.

Unfortunately they say they can only manage it in 10 days and not the 7 I’ve set out to do.

I’m hoping to whittle down this 10 day itinerary to 7 by asking the enormously helpful, generous and smart people on Twitter.

Do you know anyone extremely knowledgeable about travel, airlines, the countries that the new 7 wonders of the world are in, has a private jet or all of the above?

Then please ask them to peruse this travel itinerary and see if there’s any way this trip could be done in 7 days. If anyone reckons it can, please leave me a comment.

I’m forever grateful for your help! If you’re on Twitter, please consider tweeting this list. Thanks so much.

Here’s the list.

9/9/09 Manchester, UK to Rome, Italy via Brussels 1035 – 1555
10/9/09 Rome, Italy to Amman, Jordan via Beirut 1220 – 1800
11/9/09 Amman, Jordan to Delhi, India non stop 2015 – 0415 12/09
13/9/09 Delhi, India to Beijing, China non stop 0315 – 1225
13/9/09 Beijing, China to Lima, Peru via Toronto 1800 – 2055
15/9/09 Lima, Peru to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via Sao Paulo 0050 – 1030
15/9/09 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Cancun, Mexico via Newark, US 1850 – 1115 16/09
17/9/09 Cancun, Mexico to Manchester, UK via Chicago, US 1550 – 1440 18/09

Any comments, queries or questions, just ask in the comments.

Image credit: rodbaston.ac.uk

UPDATE: The following 7 Wonders in 7 Days travel itinerary, kindly provided by the Manchester branch of independent travel specialists Trailfinders incorporates Sharon’s suggestion in the comments below.

It’s a phenomenal amount but I’m convinced it is possible. If Phil could do it then so can I.

7 Wonders in 7 Days Charity Cheque

In case you aren’t familiar with Phil’s story, he was told by doctors that he would never walk again after being badly injured in a rocket attack in Basra last February.

On Saturday he completed the 26.2 mile-long Flora London Marathon after starting with other competitors on 26th April, taking 13 days to walk 15,400 agonising steps.   On crutches.

He is a paraplegic having sustained heart and spinal injuries during the attack.

His inspiring story has been written by the UK press in countless places.

On that note, I’ll share a little bit about why I’m attempting the 7 Wonders in 7 Days trip.

The project itself has its seeds in my visit to Nigeria for my grandmother’s funeral in February.

I learnt a lot about my gran during the trip.  She died from complications arising from Alzheimer’s late last year aged 83.

She was an inspiring woman and I’ll share a lot more about her life as the project progresses.

One of the 7 charities I’ve chosen to support is the Alzheimer’s Research Trust.

I’m going to post a little more about all the 7 charities I’ve chosen in coming weeks but in the meantime here’s a brief introduction to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust.

The Alzheimer’s Research Trust
The Alzheimer’s Research Trust is funding world-class research to find ways to cure, prevent or treat Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

It is the UK’s leading research charity for dementia and is dedicated to funding scientific studies to find ways to treat, cure or prevent Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, Lewy Body disease and fronto-temporal dementia.

It does not receive any government funding and instead relies on donations from individuals, companies and charitable trusts, money raised by individuals and gifts left in people’s Wills to fund its vital work.

Image Credit: CharitiesTrust.org

Spent ages yesterday and today on the design of the site. As you can see, we now have a great big Donate button in the sidebar and a Countdown timer which I’m still tweaking.

Just saw the awesome video above by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on YouTube. Really reminds me of how wise it was to chose to support the British Red Cross as one of the 7 charities I am raising funding for through the 7 Wonders in 7 days trip.

Years ago, growing up in Nigeria, we had an after school club for the Red Cross (probably the Nigerian Red Cross….) Kind of like kids have Brownies and Scouts in the UK. Other than getting a shiny white uniform with what I thought was the coolest red tie ever, and learning a bit about the history of the Red Cross, I didn’t really get to know much about the organisation.

What I am finding out now impresses me a great deal.

Check out the video and it’s accompanying post on the YouTube blog.

Heartwarmingly good work.

Phew, just confirmed that the site’s little video player works as well! Yay…

A few days ago I picked up a 10 day travel itinerary to see all 7 wonders of the world created by Thomas Cook Manchester’s very kind World Travel expert, Kathryn.

Kathryn did a fantastic job in sourcing the info in less than 24 hours, much better than my initial querying at Thomson who took nearly two weeks to tell me they couldn’t do it.  They said they could only visit 5 of the 7 countries.

I’ll be posting details about the itinerary in coming days, suffice to say I expect I’ll have to do some crowdsourcing on Twitter to narrow it down to 7 days.  This is a trip to see the 7 Wonders in 7 Days not in 10!

In the meantime, as you can see I’ve been busy on the site design and managed to finish the logo and favicon images today.  I’ve also installed the original Premium News WordPress theme by those lovely guys at WooThemes so things are looking much nicer around here.

Adii, this one’s a big thank you and keep up the good work at Woo Themes!

Adii worked with me to design my company website at www.realfresh.tv back in 2007.  He is a WordPress Rockstar and deserves all the success he’s been getting.

Back onto the 7 Wonders In 7 Days project.

Hope you like the image that accompanies this post.

It’s a map of the trip I made myself with a little help from Google Image Search.

Love it.

Stay tuned to site design and project Twitterings on the 7WondersIn7Days Twitter stream.

I’m going to try posting details about the design as it happens so it’s the place to learn a few tips on WordPress design and development.  I’m kind of treating this entire project as a learning exercise on many fronts, WordPress development and PHP development included.

Till next time… stay safe.

The date: 9/09/09.

The reason: why not?

I’ll be blogging about the journey, every step of the way.

Come along for the ride!

Now off to start working on the rest of the site design.   As far as the trip goes, have been to a couple of travel agents and asked about how feasible it is to try this mad adventure and achieve the goal in 7 days.

They are looking into it.  Say it will cost lots of money.  If it is possible.

Not a problem.

Where there’s a will and all that.

You might be interested to know that it is possible to book a trip to see all new 7 wonders in 70 days!

Keep checking back.

Oh and I’ll tweet occassionally here:  @7WondersIn7Days

Image credit: DrJeffCornwall.com