Social Action
Social Action at Eton encompasses the giving of time and/or money, raising awareness of important issues, campaigning for an important cause, and devising a social action project. This list is not exhaustive; social action includes anything that involves an Eton student going beyond themselves to be of benefit and service to others. It can take place across various disciplines, including Career Education, Sports, Debating, Music, etc.
Some social action opportunities are built within the structure of the school, whilst others involve an Eton student taking the initiative to use their voice and actions in a meaningful way to bring a practical and positive difference to others.
Stats
About 200 pupils were involved in volunteering activities (mostly but not only through the ECCE programme).
100 students are actively taking part in partnerships activities such as school visits, creating workshops for primary schools, etc.
Over 40 hours a term are dedicated to volunteering outside of dedicated volunteering time like ECCE
33 pupils in Years 9-11 actively taking part in volunteering (the highest number so far).
Students independently fundraised over £15,000 for 10+ charities since September 2021.
Some activity examples:
Supporting Slough Mencap’s 70th anniversary through a fundraising drive and by offsetting costs of their anniversary celebration
Delivering 90 Christmas goodie bags to seniors in the local community
Students hand wrote individual Christmas cards for each goody bag (designed by Jack in Year 13).
20 students and 5 teachers took part in a Sleepout to raise funds for the homeless in Windsor and Slough
A school-wide fundraising effort to support UNICEF's Ukraine Appeal. £40,000 was raised.
Eduspots is an educational charity and NGO that operates in Ghana and the UK. It connects students in Ghana with UK students through online courses that develop social literacy. In the Michaelmas and Lent Halves, thirteen students took part, with 3 achieving distinctions.
Social Action Hub
The Social Action Hub is a room used for meetings and has drop-in office hours for students and staff. This is a collaboration space for all involved with social action. Environmental Action and Social Action are now able to work closely together and support one another, enabling the growth of both areas within the school.
Art of Debating
(Student-led project during Michaelmas 2021)
In Lent 2021, Hasit (Year 12) entered the Khemka Social Impact Prize with his project titled Art of Debating, which focused on providing debating training to students from schools that do not have debating programmes. Unfortunately, out of 8 entries he did not even place in the top 3 of the prize.
However, the project caught the eye of the Social Action Mentor, who approached Hasit about running the sessions with partner schools. During his presentation, Hasit had shared how over the summer he had run debating workshops for state school students in his local community, giving 8 virtual lessons and running many practice debates over Zoom. Each programme ran over one week, and he had run several programmes over the course of the summer. He was keen to organise a similar programme for partner school students.
Through several meetings with the Social Action Mentor a general plan and schedule was made up that would work for Hasit, his helpers (other Eton students in Years 12 and 13), and students from the partner schools. With the help of the Eton Connect and TVLP teams, emails were sent to partner schools advertising the workshops.
Over the course of the term weekly sessions took place on Zoom, with students from LAE, Windsor Boys’ School, and Beechwood School taking part. During each session Hasit would first deliver a lecture; then the students would be given a motion to prep in breakout rooms, and then a debate would be run. The Eton students would then give feedback to the students.
Feedback from students after the end of the course was positive:
‘I enjoyed learning new styles of debating and how to structure arguments.’ - LAE student
‘The PowerPoint presentations helped a lot as they always demonstrated a way we could develop our debating.’ – Windsor Boys’ School student
Hasit was keen to run the course again during the following term, and these workshops have now become a regular part of the Community Engagement programme.
UNICEF Ukraine Appeal
Eton Action raised funds for the UNICEF Ukraine Appeal, which was designed specifically to help children impacted by the war. In addition to other forms of help, nearly £30,000 was raised towards this appeal with the help of donations from staff, parents, students, and Old Etonians.
In addition to the school-wide fundraiser for UNICEF Ukraine, many students organised fundraisers to raise even more funds to support children impacted by the war:
Year 12 students organised an inter-house basketball tournament, raising over £250.
The students of The Hopgarden House played atrium sponge football for 24 non-stop hours raising over £3,600 for UNICEF.
The 12-in-24 marathon returned, with the students of Durnford House playing 12 sports continuously over 24 hours and raising nearly £5,500 (split between UNICEF and the 5 Eton Action charities)
P (Year 12) designed and produced t-shirts to sell, with all profits going to the UNICEF Ukraine Appeal (over £50).
Year 12 tutor group, organised and took part in a ‘Sleep In’. For three days they stayed in a teacher's classroom, eating and sleeping there too. The students only left the room to attend lessons. The idea was to experience what Ukrainian refugees may be going through; through their efforts they raised over £1,000 for UNICEF.
Sleep Out
On a cold night in March, 20 students and 5 teachers took part in the Eton College Sleepout to raise funds for two charities: Windsor Homeless Project and the London and Slough Run. Organised by a Year 13 student, the idea was to provide a greater insight into homelessness whilst raising much needed funds for the two charities. Pupils and teachers slept on cardboard leftover from food deliveries to the dining hall, with sleeping bags borrowed from the CCF, and were given soup for dinner. Whilst this is clearly a far cry from the harsh reality of sleeping on the streets, it helped raise awareness about the difficulties of sleeping rough.
Ice Bucket Challenge for Looked After Children
In 2020, the Head Master announced Eton2020: A New Social Vision, which includes bursaries to bring looked after students to Eton. This resonated with two Year 11 students who felt that it was important to do something to support looked after children. They set a fundraising target of £6,500; with 1,300 students at Eton they believed that if each donated £5 they would be able to reach this goal easily. To encourage donations, they used the famous ALS Ice-Bucket Challenge, asking staff at the school to ‘ice’ themselves. The Head Master pledged to take ‘The Ice’ himself as the Grand Finale if they reached our goal of £6,500. Through hard work and determination the fundraising goal was met, and on a November’s morning the Head Master received a ‘Grand Iceing’ in front of the whole school!
Santa Fun Run
In 2019, a Year 12 student discovered that a Santa Fun Run organised by the local charity Alzheimer’s Dementia Support would be taking place at Dorney Lake. His grandmother had Dementia and having spent a month living with her the previous summer, he came to see first-hand how devastating this disease is. He wanted to do something to raise awareness and help support the countless families that are struggling with it, so he searched ‘Dementia Eton’ to find out how he could get involved and saw the 5K Santa Fun Run around Dorney Lake. He took it upon himself to organise a team from Eton, which included 10 students and 1 teacher. They raised over £6,500 and completed in the top 10 of all runners (out of a total 150), with one Year 12 student coming in 2nd place overall.
Since then, the Santa Fun Run has become a regular fixture in the December school calendar. Each year a different student takes the lead and organises a run to raise funds for the charity Alzheimer’s Dementia Support. In 2020, £12,500 was raised.
Friendly Club
For over 50 years Eton students have been volunteering weekly at Friendly Club with Slough Mencap, a local charity that provides services to people with learning disabilities. They receive no financial support other than the funds raised by themselves. Recently, the local council cut all services for adults with learning disabilities so Slough Mencap has had to begin providing extra services to ensure that the most vulnerable continue to receive support.
To support Slough Mencap, two students who volunteered weekly took it upon themselves to raise some much-needed funds. The Year 12 students organised a school-wide fundraiser which included a 5-a-side football tournament. Year 12 tutor groups paid £5 per person to play a round of football against another tutor group. 7 tutor groups participated, and including a £1,000 donation from Eton College as well as generous donations from staff, parents, and Old Etonians, the students were able to raise over £3,000 for Slough Mencap.
Slough Mencap’s 70th anniversary falls on 25th June 2022, meaning that Eton students have been a weekly part of the charity for 70% of its existence. To celebrate this, the Head of Community Engagement and the Master in Charge of Friendly Club attended the 70th anniversary celebration, with the Eton College Catering Team at Bekynton kindly providing the food and drinks. It was a lovely afternoon filled with shared memories and photographs. In honour of this anniversary, the Community Engagement team reached out to Old Etonians who had volunteered at Slough Mencap whilst they were at Eton. What became clear is that Friendly Club was an incredibly important activity for many Etonians and helped shape the paths their lives took. The team heard from many Old Etonians who spoke warmly about their time with Friendly Club and shared these thoughts with the Slough Mencap team during the 70th anniversary celebration:
“The Friendly Club was my first engagement with the world beyond home and boarding school, both perceived as secure and privileged. But the real privilege, not recognised perhaps at the time, was entering the world of the Friendly Club. It opened my eyes to others who faced challenges and struggles beyond anything I or my peers had to face. I can honestly say that Friendly Club was the most important and most formative part of my 5 years at Eton. What remains with me is the absolute non-judgmental warmth of acceptance we encountered” - A (OE, 1974 JA)
“It meant a huge amount to me to be involved with the Friendly Club and I will never forget it.” - C (OE, 1968 MNF)
“Being part of the Friendly Club was, without doubt, a particular highlight of my time at Eton. It was an extremely formative, grounding and hugely enjoyable experience.” - N (OE, 1987 NJTJ)
Row for Ukraine
After an accident, one of the Eton rowers, spent a year in an Ilizarov frame - a device invented on the Ukrainian border to repair shattered bones. Appalled by the injuries inflicted on innocent children in Ukraine and memories of his own recovery, the student and his friends organised a sponsored row, on a large scale, to support Save The Children’s work in Ukraine. Eton’s entire rowing squad (up to 150 rowers) took to Dorney Lake in Ukrainian national rowing suits and attempted to ‘Row to Ukraine’ - a distance of 2,000km.
The event took place on a blistering hot day, 14th June 2022. Despite the heat the rowers managed to row 2,407 km. This is appropriately the distance to Kherson - the home city of Ukrainian world champion Dmitriy Mikhay, who joined the team on the water. Through generous donations over £38,500 was raised, with all funds going to Save the Children UK to support their work in Ukraine.
Angus Irvine Playing Fields Fund
Year 12 student and keen footballer organised a football tournament to raise funds for the Angus Irvine Playing Fields Fund. Having grown up playing football in Oxfordshire, in particular playing for Oxford City FC for five years, Louis knew what a difference playing sport can make. The Playing Fields Legacy Fund was a charity established by the late Angus Irvine in 2012, prompted by what he felt was a failure of the 2012 London Olympics to provide the promised legacy for grassroots sport.
In order to raise funds for the Playing Fields Legacy Fund the student ran an inter-House, five-a-side tournament in the garden of his boarding House. 16 Houses participated in the tournament during which two 15-minute games were played each night, for nine days, culminating in a nail-biting final. In total, Louis raised over £2,200 for this charity which was close to his heart.
