Byte Night
BYTE NIGHT - An appeal to boost sleeper recruits - How the annual IT-industry sleep out needs you to sign up and enable Action for Children to help more homeless young Scots.
This is a personal request from the Chair of Byte Night Scotland Robert Heggie, BDO LLP for you to consider joining us, either individually or as a team from your company, to sleep rough at Holyrood Park in Edinburgh on the night of Friday, 8th October and in doing so, raising money for Action for Children through experiencing in a small but symbolic, way what it is like to be homeless. Some people may think that they don't fancy sleeping out in bad weather, but 2008 was a lovely evening weather-wise, whereas 2009 was not - that's a 50% success rate so far!! - but seriously, consider this, you can at least return to your cosy beds and homes in the knowledge that you have done your bit to help this very worthwhile cause, unlike the young Scots that we are trying to help.
Byte Night ( http://www.bytenight.org.uk/ ) raises money to help Action for Children tackle the root causes of youth homelessness and get thousands of children and young people off the streets and into secure accommodation with education and training opportunities that can change the course of their lives. Research has shown that, each year, at least 75,000 children and young people experience homelessness . Of those, 1 in 3 attempt suicide and 1 in 7 young runaways are physically or sexually assaulted (this figure rises to almost 1 in 2 after a week) . For more information about Action for Children, see http://www.bytenight.org.uk/action-for-children.cfm
Now in its 12th year, Byte Night is the single biggest annual fundraising event for Action for Children. Byte Night is a unique event that takes place across the UK on the same night and is, as you can imagine from the name and will see from the content, primarily an IT-business sector event . As such, it would be particularly relevant for you to participate, either individually or by forming a team from your company - to register, go to http://www.bytenight.org.uk/register-step1.cfm . In doing so, you will be joining many of your colleagues in the IT-business sector nationally - see the list of this years sleepers and supporters at http://www.bytenight.org.uk/2010-sleepers.cfm & http://www.bytenight.org.uk/supporters.cfm
There are still 2 months to go until the event, so please don't think that it won't be possible to reach your fundraising target in time (eg: £500 is the target for an individual sleeper, £2,500 is the target for a team of 5 people) - for the inaugural Scottish event on 3 October 2008, we reached our target of £5k (from 10 sleepers) on the actual night of the sleep out, having only started fundraising during September 2008. Last year we carried on fundraising after the event was completed to ensure that we could reach our higher target of £7,500 as we had increased our sleepers to 15.
Remember, the support of the IT-business sector via Byte Night is vital to ensuring that Action for Children continue to assist thousands of vulnerable young people each year - so please join me on Friday, 8th October at Holyrood Park in Edinburgh by registering to sleep out as noted above. In doing so you can help us to reach our Scottish sleeper target of 200 for this year (35 in 2008, 105 in 2009).
Please follow this link to see a personal message from Ken Deeks, the founder of Byte Night - it really puts things into perspective. http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/comment/2266922/byte-night-2010ng.co.uk/computing/comment/2266922/byte-night-2010
