Building unlikely alliances to save children's lives
The ColaLife Facebook Group has received a boost today thanks to Sean Moncrieff and all the lovely people at newstalk radio, Ireland. Thanks particularly to newstalk listeners Stephen Byrne and Neil Curran who actually posted positive messages on the wall of the Facebook Group.
I was interviewed over the phone this afternoon by Sean . . . . although Caroline and Naomi at newstalk had set me up for a pre-recorded session, I found myself talking to Sean live!
Thanks for your support.
The Facebook Group numbers were up by more than the usual this morning thanks to talkSPORT listeners across the country. Thanks to all those who followed through from the interview that went out in the very early hours of this morning. We are now 5,710.
I got a call while on the train yesterday morning from talkSPORT Radio to ask if I’d do an interview for The Ultimate Later Night Show with Adrian Goldberg. Adrian has been supporting the ColaLife Campaign from the very early days and has featured it on The Stirrer Blog. – ‘news that matters, campaigns that count’. I hadn’t realised that Adrian also hosted the talkSPORT Show.
Thanks for being so generous with your networks Adrian . . . we must meet up some time and I must buy you a beer!
Here is today’s interview on the BBC World Service. I was expecting something much more linked up. During the week we’d talked about linking it to the WaterAid publication (Tackling the silent killer) that came out last week to coincide with the G8 Summit. In the end it was a standalone slot just 4 minutes long.
Thanks to The World Today weekend team for setting this opportunity up.
BBC World Service Interview | 13/7/08 by colalife
On Sunday (13/7/08) at 5am (BST) I’ll be on my bike on my way to BBC Bush House for the Weekend edition of The World Today on the BBC World Service. I’ll be discussing the Coca-Cola Campaign with a panel of people which includes a Professor of Econmic Development from Kenya who will be in the Nairobi studio.
You should be able to hear the programme live here at 5am GMT (6am BST). I’ll try and get a recording.
Here is a status report delivered through a 3 minute video interview with David Wilcox at socialreporter.com
Simon Berry from David Wilcox on Vimeo.
Many thanks are due to my friend David Wilcox for filming, editing and uploading the full interview with Jennifer Tracey of iPM. Here it is – cheers David:
Simon Berry interviewed by BBC iPM from David Wilcox on Vimeo.
The edited (audio-only) interview is here.
Further information:
All of the Coca Cola campaign posts
I was very grateful to have been invited to contribute to the inspiring 2gether08 event last Thursday. I attended with two hats on.
In my current role as secondee to CLG, I’d gone there to check out my hunch that this is the sort of event and network that local and national Government needs to engage with if we are to make progress with the Government’s policy of community empowerment. My hunch was right and at the very, very last minute national Government did get involved with Tom Watson MP using the event to promote the ‘mash-up’ competion – Show Us a Better Way. Hopefully their involvement will be better planned and more strategic next year.
While I was there I also did a mini presentation and led a ‘next steps’ discussion with a group of people behind the Coca-Cola Campaign. More on this later.
At the event, during the coffee break, I got a surprise call from Jennifer Tracey (pictured!) who asked to meet to talk about what had happened since Radio 4′s iPM Programme first featured the campaign in May. You can listen to an edit of the interview below or by going to the feature on the iPM website. Thanks are due again to the whole of the iPM Team who really helped to get this campaign off to a flying start.
| Add IPM Radio4′s channel to your page |
My good friend David Wilcox just loves gathering stories on video. Take a look over here on socialreporter.com. We met up today for our regular top-up of “getting all excited about the possibilities Web 2.0 offers” and we got on to the Coca Cola campaign and David pointed a camera at me. This is the result . . . . sorry, I’m a bit nervous to begin with but I get into it!
Thanks David.
Further information
Eddie Mair | Rupert Allman | George South
These guys have worked their socks off this week to support the Coca Cola campaign and the results came together beautifully at 5:30pm today on the iPM programme on Radio 4. In exchange for a simple idea and interview from me they have:
This is how the whole thing is reported on the iPM website:
We’d like to teach the world to sing . . .
Copyright problems mean that podcast listeners will have been denied the chance to hear our very first iPM song. It’s Eve Graham of the New Seekers, and she’s singing about this.
Not to neglect our digital listeners, may we suggest a home
performance of the anthem? By marrying the lyrics below with the chords
D, E, A, G and D, you can take part in our biggest crowd-sourcing
project yet. We’d like to teach the world to sing (but we can’t help on
the guitar unfortunately).
I’d like to fix those Burmese homes;
Give poverty the shove
Grow sustainable trees, give aid with ease
And show Africa some love..Chorus:
I’d like to reach the world and bring
It perfect harmony.
I’d like to reach its outstretched arms
But I need a company:
They’re the real thing
The world needs them today.
They’re the real thing
The world needs them today
(Coca-Cola)
Now, I just happened to have my recorder running while the show was on and by some fluke of ICT trickery the recording of the item, including the song has ended up here.
Here is the whole feature:
The original ColaLife feature on iPM | 24 05 2008 by colalife
Here is the song only:
Eve Graham sings a song for ColaLife on iPM | 25/5/08 by colalife
Further information
The interview with Eddie Mair went ahead
today – what a nice man! He is even more amusing off air than he it on air!
Because of the nature of the iPM programme they are happy for me to publish the
whole interview here ahead of the programme on Saturday. How refreshing! [In fact they have also published it on the iPM Blog].
I do make some sweeping
generalisations in the interview which I apologise for but I wanted to keep the
message simple. This is how it is reported on the iPM Blog:
Simon Berry and others on the [iPM] blog have been keen for iPM to to hear more about his big idea.
For more than ten years, Simon worked all over the world as part of the
British aid effort. He thinks there is a simple way to help the one in five children in Africa who die from simple causes – usually diarrhoea. And the answer is Coca-Cola.
Not the product – but its distribution network. We’ve asked Coca-Cola
to debate, but in the meantime Eddie has been speaking to Simon about
him and his idea.
Add Coca Cola is it to your page The version that goes out on Saturday will be an edited version of this. There is a possibility that this won’t go out at all; if Coca Cola respond then another interview might be done which is more interactive. That would be brilliant.
Further information
