It’s a testament to the scale of what Medic to Medic did at UCL in October that trying to fit it all into a 400 word article feels nigh-on impossible. That said, in October, so did pulling off the Give One campaign, so I’ll give it a go.

Give One was an idea that we had 3 years ago when we were just thinking about starting Medic to Medic UCL, and this year we finally found the right time to make it happen. It’s a very simple idea, which really helped us communicate it to people. We just wanted to try, in a two week period, to get £1 from every student at UCL. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable suggestion when we started, although the job seemed to get bigger and bigger the closer we got to October!

However, after a lot of hard work from a lot of people, we were amazed at the response we managed to get from the UCL student body. In a university of 11,000 undergraduates we raised almost £3,000, paying for the education of 3 new medical students in Malawi who otherwise would never have made it to med school, and quadrupling the amount that Medic to Medic UCL has previously raised.

The campaign has acted as a launch-pad for the committee at UCL, having raised a huge amount of interest in what we do. We launched the campaign with a massive publicity effort provided by another student group at UCL, FreeHype, who provide publicity services to voluntary groups. UCL was infiltrated by a small army of ‘1’s which appeared all over the campus to raise awareness of the event, followed by a large army of volunteers who came out every lunch time for 2 weeks to jingle buckets at lunching students, several of whom have decided to stay on and get involved with running the group.

I have to say thank you to everyone who got involved and made the campaign possible. It was something that I genuinely thought was a pipe dream for a long, long time; now it will always be a reminder of what can be accomplished by a few determined people and some cardboard.