Sheffield Raising and Giving (RAG) celebrated its centenary anniversary this year with a 10-day long virtual RAG week.
RAG began in 1920 as ‘Hospital Saturday’, where medical students raised money for local hospitals. It has since developed into fundraising for charities across Sheffield and South Yorkshire.
Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, activities this year were made virtual in order to follow University and Government guidelines.
The committee said: “Normally, we work with numerous societies to run events across the University, ranging from flash mobs to bake sales and pub quizzes to 24 hour challenges.
“The restrictions this year have meant we’ve adapted to make as many of these possible at a safe social distance. We’re still fundraising during RAG Week with the help of so many great societies.”
Bake Soc got involved with a week-long campaign of events to raise money for Sheffield Mind, which included a baking challenge judged by Rahul Mandal, previous winner of Great British Bake Off.
President of Bake Soc, Katie Garvey, said: “It was great to get everyone together virtually to raise awareness about mental health and do something really positive and wholesome like baking. We’ll be keeping our Virgin Money page live all month for donations to Mind, it’s a really important charity doing essential work so do donate if you can.”
Over the course of the week, the Carbon Neutral Society has been collectively walking and running 100km to raise money for the Trussell Trust. The committee said: “So far we have raised £53 for the charity and hope to continue raising more money with the continuation of our walks and runs.”
RAG also held their own event, ‘RAGmaster 100’, a series of 10 challenges across 10 days, which are based on the TV game show, Taskmaster. One fundraiser, Steve Maloney, said: “I took part in two of RAG week’s RAGmaster challenges, the stack-10 challenge and the bottle-flip challenge. It was great helping to raise money for three great causes, the Cathedral Archer Project, Sheffield Mind and High Peak Foodbank by doing something easy and fun in the house.”
Featured image: Bake Soc
