British webcasters, The Yogscast, have managed to raise more than £200,000 for Oxfam, smashing last year’s charity drive by £140,000.
All the money raised goes to buying bees and feeding into the charity’s emergency response funds.
Details below. Plus, a video of a sexy bee.
Last year through DecemberYogscast managed to raise more than £60,000 for the charity Oxfam and their Goat Scheme(you pay £25 for Oxfam to give a goat to an African family, providing a source of income for people in extreme poverty. I presume the goat is air-dropped in). This year the webcaster team decided to run the drive again, this time backing the Plan Bee and 365 Emergency Fund Schemes.
Plan Bee is similar to the Goat project in that it providesEthiopianfamilies with a source of sustainable income and the training to manage it. It just swaps goats out for bee hives. The project only needed to raise £10,000 (a figure that Oxfam then committed a further £10,000 to) to get off the ground.
The 365 Emergency fund is the pot Oxfam dip into whenever they provide relief following a disaster.
Yogscast’s own Mark Turpin told us how they “set up a new live streaming room where we then had members of the Yogscast run daily sessions between 6 and 8 hours long inviting our audience to donate and support the cause.” It wasn’t long till the £10,000 needed to Plan Bee was raised. Since then all the money that’s been donated has gone towards the 365 Emergency Fund.
Although the streams only ran through December, attracting the likes of Peter Molyneux to co-host,they’ve kept the donation page open. Earlier this week they passed £202,000.
“Gamers are great at topping each other’s high scores and we saw the community come together to really smash the previous record from last year’s fund raiser which also won JustGiving’s Most Popular Fundraiser of 2011,” Turpin told us. “We never expected to raise as much money as we did and couldn’t be prouder to be a part of an online community that shows such compassion and generosity during the festive period.”
Yup, we’re a little late on reporting this one but it’s a great cause and the donation page is still open so it’s worth you gals and guys knowing about it.
Oh yes, that sexy bee: