The evening I grew up as a fundraiser

I want to tell you about an evening that changed me as a fundraiser. Let me take you back almost exactly 20 years. I was a junior fundraiser and charity administrator, with much more hair, often wearing Tshirts, jogging bottoms and trainers. But get that image out of your head. I was wearing black tie on the evening I'm going to tell you about. I was very involved with a student-run charity I was passionate about, the charity that brought me into a career in the voluntary sector. I’ve written about them in this blog. Anyway, distributed around campus were leaflets from a multi-national company offering grants and funding to action-related charities and enterprises. There was a form to fill in, and awards were to be handed out after a swanky dinner hosted by the company. Now, I was - and still am - a firm believer in my charity. I knew what a difference we made to the children we reached. I knew that I could describe that difference well, as an English graduate, and having worked with them for over three years. So I set about filling in the application form, and was pleased to be invited to the awards dinner. I got my fancy suit ready. That meant that we would win, didn't it? You know what happened already, don’t you? We didn’t win anything. The winning enterprise was a beer-making project. That night, I was distraught and angry. How could anything be more important than my charity? Why had they spent so much money on the dinner for over 100 peop