International cultural exchange and children’s rights are the same job.

A stall at UNICEF Day, trading games for donations: beanbag throws, guess-the-weight, and a board where you write one line to a child far away.

The point is to turn donating from an abstraction into something you do with your hands. You drop the coins in yourself, we write the amount on the board in front of you, and we count it together when we pack up. Everything raised goes to UNICEF’s education work.

A winter sale of hot drinks the committee made and small things students donated. Every price went on one handwritten card, and we counted up the same afternoon.

It was a test of whether small giving adds up — most people put in ten or twenty dollars, and together it became real money that reaches a child. The total went to UNICEF’s child protection work.

Students from three schools each took a stall and introduced one place through its food, music and ordinary days. We also collected small donations through the day.

The point was to keep exchange from being a lecture you sit through: you stand up and explain your own thing, then walk over and ask about someone else’s. The total went to UNICEF’s nutrition work.

A two-hour workshop reading Article 22 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and asking what a child without identity papers actually meets at a school gate. Small donations were collected on the day.

The point was to make UNICEF’s work on refugee children into something a student can hold: not a distant statistic, but whether a child can enrol. The total went to UNICEF’s work with refugee children.

We hosted six students from a sister school for a day: the school, one bus ride, one meal.

Nothing was raised here — this day was about doing the exchange properly. The cost and the hours came out of the committee’s own pockets and never touched a donation, and that is recorded in the ledger too.