Forget '3', '1140412' is the magic number!!

So after months of paperwork being fired back and forth between 'Patchwork World' and the 'Charity Commission', we are now officially recognised as a charity, here in the UK (charity number '1140412').

This means an awful lot to us, not only does it mean that we can start to receive donations online, and apply for funding previously out of our reach, but also it gives us a real push to remain focussed on the long term benefits of 'Patchwork World'.

Our focus is of course still with the imminent 'Real Way Down' project, and with little over a month to go until our planned departure date, there is a lot of work still to do.

Our early efforts with events, and grants from ISA Travel Award, and FARE has put us in good stead, but now the real push begins. Through the kind assistance and support of Owen O'Carroll, partner at Stock Woolstencroft, we are beginning our corporate sponsorship push in earnest next week, and have been frantically putting the pieces in place for this. We are looking at securing somewhere in the region of £10,000 from corporate support, and this will both help us ensure minimum donations of £250 to each of our partner charities, whilst also assisting us with production costs for the film.

Cindy has been busily applying for several media partnerships, production partnerships, and journalistic opportunities, and things are looking very bright in this department. We have confirmed media partners now in 'True Tube', 'Zommin.tv', 'Community Channel', and 'London Macadam', and on top of this have had press this week in the 'Warwick Courier', and also a lot of advanced interest from various other publications.

Tom and Hass @ MustardUp are busily working away on a new HTML website to follow our journey as we go. This decision was made to both ease the process of uploading new videos, photos, and text from the field, and also so as to make the website viewable on older computers, with poor internet connectivity, around the world. Our initial flash site, will be used as a post event presentation site, with complete interactivity, and a whole host of interesting features.

We will be filming a trial video with a local charity 'Leamington Christian Mission' here in the Midlands in a fortnights time. This charity do fantastic work for the homeless, and under privileged members of the local community, and we are proud to support the work of Geoff and Steph Devlin, even in this tiny way.

Keep posted for more news coming soon.

Matt