A number of stars have removed their clothing for charity. The calendar features a range of people we usually see with their clothes on, from Apprentice contestant Kate Walsh to former Strictly Come Dancing contestant Camilla Dallerup and athletes like Sol Campbell and Jimmie Anderson. Even veteran actor Christopher Biggins has stripped for the Cancer Research UK campaign which is called Give Up Clothes For Good and is designed to encourage the public to empty their wardrobes to raise funds for cancer research.

On the other hand, giving clothing to charity isn’t without risk. Robbers are raiding clothing banks and stealing donations meant for the poor in Wiltshire. The Salvation Army clothing banks have been broken into several times in the past month and large amounts of casual clothing have been stolen.

Many companies are also getting into the corporate clothing giving scheme – whether it’s putting a clothing bank in the car park to encourage staff to donate their old clothing or investing in simple uniform items such as wholesale T-shirts and then asking staff to gift aid to a charity the money they’d otherwise have spent on clothing for work.

The Crisis charity’s 2008 Reverse Graffiti campaign has become one of the benchmarks for city-based charities.

•    The aim – Crisis wanted to highlight the fact that although where were now fewer people now living on the streets of major British cities, sizeable hidden homeless population of thousands were leading ‘invisible lives’ in hostels and temporary accommodation that didn’t address their needs to a stable home, training and a chance to find permanent employment.
•   The process – rather than using paint or spray cans, water was used through a sprayer to clear dirt from city walls through a stencil in the shape of a homeless person in shapeless clothing huddled against a wall. The shape was actually made up of the words ‘most homeless people have moved on but their problems haven’t gone away’ and included the charity’s website address. 15 teams dressed in Crisis branded clothing worked through a single night across London to create ‘reverse’ graffiti that was seen by thousands of commuters on their way to work the next morning. Because the graffiti is actually clean wall, rather than dirty, it’s not classed as vandalism or damage to property.
•    The outcome – the campaign, which Crisis featured on its Facebook page, resulted in 50 PR follow-ups, more than 120,000 visits to the Crisis website and 60 new regular donors being recruited.

International charity Oxfam has partnered with magazine producer IPC Media. The charity is giving away copies of the music magazine NME in their shops in return for donations. The slogan is swap ‘old music for new music’ and encourages the public to bring in unwanted items from their music collection (records, cassettes and CDs) and take away a free copy of the re-launched magazine in return. It’s the first time a national monthly UK publication has been given away free for charity but the charity did previously work with The Arctic Monkeys, selling the group’s singles in-store.  

And in Sheffield, a charity football match in honour of soldiers killed in Afghanistan has received a donation of sports clothing.

Local company Pyramid Carpets has donated the football strip for the players who are current and former members of Third Battalion The Yorkshire Regiment to wear. The red and blue strip has the logo of the armed forces charity Help for Heroes over that of the carpet store. The match aims to raise funds for injured soldiers from Britain’s current conflicts.

It’s a lot easier to delegate at work than at home – for one thing, in the workplace, everybody has a job description, so that might be the place to start!

Writing a simple job description for everybody in the house can be fun and informative – what can the youngest family member do: plump up the cushions? Be responsible for handing the remote to Dad? Line up the shoes in the hall? Even small and unimportant tasks teach children how to follow instructions and give them a sense of responsibility.

In one household there are rotating jobs: one week Mum loads the dishwasher, next week Dad, third week the oldest child, fourth week the youngest. Many other tasks are passed around too, which is a good idea as it stops people getting fed up with doing the same chore. In this family there are also specific clothes for each job – the dishwasher person has a special apron, the person in charge of sorting out the recycling has a big specially printed T-shirt with RECYLER printed on it, and sturdy garden gloves to keep their hands clean and so on – this gives a value to each job and reminds people that everybody contributes to running the household.

Just as everybody in a house produces  dirty dishes, dirty clothe and mess, so, in the workplace, everybody contributes to the need for housekeeping and cleaning. Making sure that every week one member of the team is responsible for washing cups and buying milk, or sorting out scrap paper so that it can be re-used on the blank side, is also good for morale as it lets employees know that you value the environment at large and their working conditions in particular.

Working together can also be important. For a family this can be one hour at the weekend before anybody is allowed to leave the house, when the lawn is mowed, shoes are polished, bills are paid etc. In the workplace this can be a great way to improve your surroundings. What about asking the team to give up one lunchtime a week to work on a community project such as planting a flowerbed or window boxes, or even growing salad vegetables in the office – you can also clean the pavement outside your building etc. Sounds a bit goody goody perhaps, but nearly everybody who does community work says they feel happier afterwards! You need to ensure proper clothing is worn for this kind of task though: overalls or sturdy jeans and specially provided T-shirts or other casual wear that can get grimy and be washed easily.

Fundraising at work can be good fun; it can help raise awareness of certain issues; and it can bring in substantial funds for a good cause, but you need several key factors n place to make it successful:

1.    Knowledge of your workplace – this allows you to understand the people you work with and what they might be willing to commit do doing, for charity
2.    Support of management – depending on what you decide to do, it is vital to have support from the various levels of management in the company. For a simple lunchtime raffle, for example, you may only need the permission of your line manager but for an assault course in the car park, the very top echelons of the company will need to agree.
3.    Health and safety input – you need to be sure that what you plan is safe and sensible and a health and safety audit allows you to be confident about your plans.

Fun ideas for workplace fundraising:

•    Sponsored wax: pick a popular (or unpopular!) hairy male colleague and get the rest of the workforce to pay a set fee for the chance to rip a waxing strip from his leg, or back or chest – the price should be lowest for the leg and highest for the prized chest-hair!  

•    Workplace auction: this is a twist on the classic auction theme – instead of selling items to the highest bidder, you auction of a set of tasks. You might get the Chief Executive to make tea and coffee for the highest bidder for a week, and the super-smart office fashion plate to agree to iron somebody’s work shirts for an entire month. Other favourite tasks to auction are photocopying duties and making sandwiches for the highest bidder’s lunch for a week.

•    Lunch swap fundraiser: this is a lovely idea that can really create a happy mood in the workplace as well as raising funds. It’s very simple – people work out how much they spend on buying a takeaway or a sandwich or visiting a café for lunch every day and agree to donate that money to the good cause. Then all their names are put into a hat and everybody pulls a name out. They make lunch for that person for a week, and somebody else makes their lunch, and so on … this way, everybody gets a home-made packed lunch and everybody gets to make a lunch. Often it can reveal hidden culinary talents and it has resulted in some workplaces having a weekly lunch-swap, with everybody donating what they would have spent to a chosen charity and then picking up a lunch-bag lovingly prepared by somebody else. One Leicester-based firm actually has a ‘spag-e-tee’ every month; where people turn up for work in their oldest T-shirt and then have a lovely spaghetti bolognaise lunch cooked in the work canteen and wear their tomato sauce stains with pride, having donated their lunch money to a children’s charity.