Ignite: Making a Difference

Downend Youth Flushed Away by Outrageous Generosity: the Ignite Youth Club Spring term Toilet-Twinning-Challenge ended on 10 March and 13 toilets are now twinned! That’s all our toilets in the Youth Hub, the Parish Hall, the Church Centre in Quakers Road and at Christ Church. We even twinned the toilets we are planning as part of the church re-ordering project!

What an amazing result for the Toilet-Twinning-Challenge in the Youth Hub. The youth group were really fired-up to twin our Youth Hub loo with one in a third world country, with the aim of raising £60 from our Youth Club members donations. The Sunday church panto cake sale raised some more, then there were donations from the Open Church Group who serve coffees and cakes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the monthly Tuesday night Christ Church Fellowship group.

£780 has been raised which means we can twin all the toilets at Christ Church, and all the toilets in the Parish Hall, the Youth Hub and at the Church Centre, Quakers Road.

Young people were able to vote to choose which countries to twin our loos with. Toilets will now be twinned across three continents in the countries; Uganda, India, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines and Guatemala. The charity @toilettwinning aims to provide sanitation and stand-pipes to communities where there is currently no toilet with running water. This reduces illness and child mortality. Children can attend school instead of having to fetch water. Women and girls are less likely to be vulnerable to attack, as they no longer go to the edge of their community to go to the toilet in the dark, in the open, late at night. And increased health from improved sanitation means better productivity, which is a way to end generational poverty.

www.toilettwinning.org provide a framed certificate showing where your twinned toilet is. Watch out for these pictures arriving soon to a loo near you! With over 2.5 billion people who don't have a toilet, around a third of the world is suffering there is plenty of scope for individuals and families to join in with this initiative.