For many students at BL, Charity Week is an established mainstay week of events in October that they have come to know and love. For others, it is simply a Facebook invite that they click on once and proceed to ignore. Well, for all those people in the second group, this is your chance to find out exactly what Charity Week is and what it entails! In its most basic form, Charity Week or CW is a week of various events with the aim of raising money for meaningful causes. This special week doesn’t just occur at Barts but across the UK in many different schools and universities, as well as Qatar, South Africa and numerous other countries.

To fully understand the core and vision of Charity Week, we must go back to the year 2000. This is when Dr Wajid Akhter (GP, Islamic Historian, Writer and Barts SSC tutor) was a student at St George’s Medical School, dreaming of establishing a week dedicated to charity, starting off with just a shoebox and handwritten poster to fundraise. I asked him a couple of questions about how he founded Charity Week and how far it’s come since.

Why did you decide to establish Charity Week? What was the thought behind it?

I looked around at the multitude of problems faced in the world - poverty, racism, oppression or climate change - and realised that the only way we could tackle them was to unite together. Separately, we don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell... but working together, there is hope.

Being a medical student at the time, it resonated with me that treating symptoms will never cure us of the disease. All the chaos we see engulfing the world is merely a symptom of a wider disease of disunity.

Charity Week is just one project whose vision is to inspire people towards seeing unity as the default, not the exception.

Did you ever imagine that CW would reach the scale it has?

Yes. This didn’t happen by accident. It was planned for; strategies were set and steps were taken. That’s why the idea of Charity Week came in late 2000 but the first actual Charity Week was in 2004.

However, it is still humbling to see plans work and dreams come into existence.

What do you think has been CW’s biggest achievement, in your eyes?

I guess people expect me to say the millions of pounds raised, the hundreds of thousands of orphans and needy children helped or the number of volunteers engaged in good wholesome activities.

But that isn’t it, as grateful as we all are for each of those other benefits.

The greatest achievement, in my opinion, is to bring the idea of Unity and the practical example to the forefront of people’s mind. If people realise that if we work together we can achieve so much more than if we don’t... It’s priceless. It means we can begin the process of changing. And if we change, then perhaps our situation will change too.

What are you most excited for Charity Week 2019?

There is so much to choose from. Finding out if we are funding cancer care and end of life services in Gaza or hepatitis screening in Pakistan is always memorable.

Seeing thousands of volunteers unite their powers and watch this unfold in events, videos and posts throughout the week where up to 250 events will be taking place each night worldwide.

Witnessing the connections being made between all the different volunteers across the world - from Cape Town to Calgary it’ll be amazing.

But what I’m most looking forward to? Sitting down and planning CW2020. This isn’t the end, it’s just the beginning.

From its humble beginnings, CW has progressed at an immensely fast rate and has been fortunate enough to fund numerous amazing causes. One of the unique qualities of Charity Week is that volunteers aren’t just pieces of a puzzle, they have a say in where the money they raise is allocated. Previously, volunteers voted between 4 projects for the worthiest cause to support, however the vast international expansion of CW has now enabled all 4 projects to be funded, as well contributing to emergency relief in international natural disasters, such as the 2018 Indonesia earthquake. This year, the 4 prominent fundraising opportunities are providing Hepatitis B screening and vaccinations in Pakistan, cancer care for children in Gaza, emergency aid to Syria/Sudan and education in multiple developing countries. As I’m sure everyone can agree, these projects are all noteworthy and well worth supporting!

Now to deliver these super plans, Charity Week requires some super events! This year’s theme is superheroes, with a special interest in Marvel. The events were carefully planned out by selected CW reps who worked hard to deliver exciting events centred around the Avengers and the concept of unity. One of the standout events was ‘Endgame: The Infinity Maze’, the sequel to the innovative Murder Mystery night of last year which gained international attention. The event was so eagerly anticipated that it was fully booked within a couple of minutes, an event carried out in our very own Garrod building! Other MARVELlous events included in CW 2019 were the popular CW quiz night, cultural parTEA, FIFA champion cup and the Big Event. The Big Event is an annual auction that occurs towards the end of Charity Week in collaboration with QM, which managed to raise an insane total of almost £10,000 this year, auctioning off items like a cake, prayer mat and even a banana. This just goes to show that whilst the ultimate purpose of CW is to collectively raise money for good causes, the spirit of it encourages us to create bigger and better events every year because of the healthy competition between universities to get the biggest total.

For those involved in Charity Week this year and importantly, for those who missed it, I hope you’re excited to volunteer or participate in Charity Week 2020. Like all other brilliant opportunities to volunteer at Barts, it’s a great way to get involved, give back and have a lot of fun!