Definitely not boring!

I blogged a few weeks ago about one of our most resilient supports, Jo Earlam, who is herself a blogger. She writes about her remarkable effort to complete 50 marathons by the time she reaches 50 in 2015. Her running is her fundraising, which is where BRACE comes in, but the running and blog are both about so much more.

It seems that Jo’s blog has attracted what she calls her “first heckler”. The heckler wrote, “Better to let the whole world think you are boring, than to write a blog and prove them 100% right.”

Okay, it was pointlessly unkind and, as far as I am concerned, complete rubbish. However, it did give me pause to think about what is interesting in fundraising and the related news which charities publish.

The blunt fact is that most fundraising events are not interesting to read about. You wouldn’t want to read a blow by blow account of a volunteers’ coffee morning unless, of course, it all went horribly wrong in hilarious fashion, as if scripted by Alan Ayckbourn. You might be impressed by someone’s efforts in an urban marathon, but you wouldn’t read several hundred words about paving stones, pedestrians and pigeons.

What makes their efforts interesting is that they are part of a bigger story, perhaps several bigger stories. People who raise funds for BRACE usually do so because their lives have been cruelly touched by dementia and they want to fight back. It’s their stories, not the making of cakes or the abseiling down the office block, which people want to read about. When they team up with BRACE, their stories intersect with a broader human story about what dementia does to ordinary lives and how we are trying to lift its curse.

We put Jo on the front of our Newsletter after her first marathon for BRACE, not because she had raised money for us, but because she had a story to tell. The how became the why and the who, and every volunteer, fundraiser and donor would have recognised something of themselves in what she wrote.

People who send us their stories and photos after their fundraising is completed give us help above and beyond the money they add to our research fund. They help other people understand why they do what they do and why it is that beating dementia matters to ordinary people everywhere. They give us colour and humanity, and we relate so much better to these warm qualities than to scientific words signifying proteins and processes in the brain.

More generally, what makes human beings interesting and remarkable is their ability to take the ordinary and do something extraordinary with it. Our volunteers take cake making and long distance running and turn them into research funds. They often take personal grief and turn it into hope for others. I think of it as a sort of alchemy, and it’s definitely not boring.