Issue 47 / August 2014

Bido Lito! August 2014 11
to have a job that pays well, and something was pricking at
my conscience about that. I’d come across this bottled water
company called One Water, an organisation that gives all of its
profits towards providing clean water in Africa. They give it to a
multitude of charities and they raise millions doing this, they’ve
become a really big brand. I was thinking ‘This is a really good
idea, how could it be transferred to other things?’ So I started
to think about if it was a profit or a percentage thing from the
sale of the bottled water, could you do that with anything?”
“I brought that idea back to Liverpool about four years ago
and got chatting to a friend of mine, Matt Johnson, who’s a local
businessman [and Be One Percent co-founder]. It was really with
his encouragement that we put a group of people around a table
who we thought would be good to advise us. In the first meeting
someone said, ‘Well, one percent from products is all very good,
but couldn’t you do that with people, couldn’t they say ‘I’m going to
give one percent of my income?’’ It was that initial seed that grew
into the concept of building a community of givers,” Steve says.
As a fundraising organisation, Be One Percent assigns the
money generated to existing charities representing causes that
the trustees feel should be highlighted. “There are already a lot
of organisations out there doing the work,” Steve states. “We
thought if we fundraise we’ll make it our job to find the best
organisations to give to. The way that we’ve modelled it is we all
give one percent of our income together each month and then we
use that money for a specific project: we get a charity to say we’ll
use the money for this or this. It might be medical treatment,
school meals or installing a new water point. Then we feed that
back to our members and say ‘This is what your one percent has
helped do this month’.”
The first project undertaken by the foundation in March 2011
saw eight members raise £166 for malaria treatments for over
300 people. As the number of members grew – with the current
total standing at 174 – the organisation has funded 35 projects
in 11 different countries. The most recent is dedicated to raising
funds to establish the production of cooking stoves in TA Kalembo
ONE PERCENT FROM
PRODUCTS IS ALL VERY GOOD,
BUT COULDN'T PEOPLE PLE SAY
'I'M GOING TO GIVE ONE
PERCENT ENT OF MY INCOME'?
in the Balaka district of Southern Malawi, where the money will
provide materials for building kilns, plus tools and training for
manufacturing the stoves.
With a huge number of charities currently in operation in the
UK and abroad, how does Be One Percent decide on which causes
to back? “All of our partner organisations can’t be above a certain
size, they have to have low running costs, low overheads, they
can’t have big marketing budgets,” Steve explains. “They work
internationally on big-scale things, but they’re not the mammoth
Water Aids and Oxfams – those ones that get criticised for being
too top heavy and having escalating marketing budgets and high
senior staff budgets.”
The running costs of the foundation are set aside from the
funds that go to the charities, something that was particularly
important to the founders Steve explains. “Personally, I know
that when I give to a charity, I wanna feel that as much of my
money is doing something positive as possible, so we were really
conscious of that when we were looking for our partners initially,”
Steve emphasises. “We get the money ring-fenced by the charities
we work with specifically, so we can say to people ‘One hundred
percent of the money you give is going to the projects, nothing is
going to the running costs’.”
With so many milestones already reached over the past three
years, what’s next for the foundation? “We’re always looking for
new organisations, to keep it fresh and be giving to a variety of
different things,” Steve says of future plans. “The more diverse
projects we have the more we’re spreading the wealth as much
as possible.”
If you’d like to join Be One Percent’s network of giving, or you’d
like to see the impact of the money raised in a community in Malawi,
go to the organisation’s website now at beonepercent.org
Turn to page 28 now to read a review of Paul Weller’s live
fundraiser show at East Village Arts Club.
bidolito.co.uk