Lifestyle

Social

A game of frisbee or five-a-side football is a great way to catch up with your mates and have some fun. Or you could join a local sports club and make some new friends.

Health

Swapping an hour or two of video games each week for more energetic activity can help you lose weight, protect you against cancer, diabetes and heart disease, and it might even help you to do better at school or work².

Time

13 hours

each week is spent playing video games by the average gamer³

To put it another way, that’s a month of non-stop gaming every year! Just think what you could do with all that time.

How?

Try out a new sport, pick up an old favourite, or simply go explore the great outdoors.
It’s normally more fun with other people, so invite your mates along to the park, the pool, or the paintball field. Go on, text them now.
Here are a few helpful starters:

• Project Wild Thing - they have some great ideas for getting stuck into nature.
• BBC guide to getting into Olympic sports - if you’re up for trying a new sport, now is a great time to start.
• Your Local Leisure Centre - find out what sports classes and clubs yours runs

Whatever you do, make sure you have fun!

Want to do this action? Head over to our list of Doers to find someone to pledge for.
 

2 Video games and academic performance

3 Time spent gaming

Money

Packets cost a bomb.

£1,000

is what you would save in a year (if you currently smoke 20 a day)

Senses

Advertisers would like us to think that smoking is attractive, but not many people find stained teeth  and stale-tobacco-smell alluring. You'll come up smelling of roses when you stop smoking. And you'll be able to smell and taste better too – so that romantic dinner date will be even more fun.

How?

Research shows that stopping smoking for 28 days, means you are five times more likely to stay smokefree. So if you can manage for our two month pledge period you're really on to a winner!

NHS's Smokefree website offers lots of helpful advice on how to quit, and they even have a 'Quit Kit' full of practical tools and advice.

Quitting may be challenging, but there are lots of things you can do to make it easier:

• Avoid the triggers – throw out your ashtrays, lighters and cigarettes. If you usually smoke with your mates at the pub, give it a miss until the cravings die down.
• Start knitting or another hobby which keeps your hands and mind occupied.
• Get active – it reduces the cravings.
• Reward yourself with something fun and sustainable with the money you save.
• Nicotine replacement therapy can be helpful in controlling cigarette cravings, but the jury's out on whether it's more effective in the long run than just going cold-turkey.

Don't give up! Everybody falls down: the winners are the ones who pick themselves up and keep going.

Want to do this action? Head over to our list of Doers to find someone to pledge for.

 

Health and social wellbeing:

Many of the DoActions involve healthier diets, taking more exercise, or building stronger communities. None of them are purely about carbon.

By setting up your own page and raising your own sponsorship, you’ll be helping your friends and fans to reap these benefits too.

Be a pioneer

Lead the revolution, show people that money isn’t always the answer.

Do something different.

How?

The DoNation was originally conceived as a sponsorship site, a unique twist on fundraising for people doing traditional sponsored challenges. But over time we’ve realised that it can be used in a whole range of different ways. Here are some ideas:

Sponsored events: be traditional (but revolutionary with it) - join the buzz of a large-scale sponsored event, whether it’s a half marathon, a triathlon, or a walk. Check out our events page for ideas.

Independent challenges: be unique– organise your own challenge, whether it’s a sponsored silence, a pie eating competition, or a LEJOG cycle.

Ticketing:use your page on The DoNation as an events page – ask people to do an action instead of paying an entry fee (or in addition to the fee, if necessary).

Gift list:getting married? Have a birthday coming up? Have you got enough stuff and don’t want any more awkward unwanted gifts? Ask your friends and family to give you a DoAction instead. Everyone wins.

Want to do this action? Head over to our list of Doers to find someone to pledge for.

Natural resources

One way or another, everything we buy comes from the earth. But we only have one earth, and its resources are finite. Our current consumption habits are so unsustainable that if everyone were to live like us in the UK we’d need three planets to support us.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that that’s not possible.

99%

of what we buy is thrown away within 6 months.[2]

By lending, loaning and borrowing more of our things, we can readjust the balance and reduce the strain on our limited natural resources.

Money

Borrowing instead of buying has obvious financial rewards, but lending and sharing can be equally kind on the wallet when you use one of the many clever person-to-person rental systems that help you earn an income from lending your things. 

How?

If you’re lending or loaning to a friend and you know what they want then it’s simple – just hand it over. But if you’re branching out a bit wider, then here are a few places that can help you:

Lend everyday objects: Ecomodo will take the hassle out of loaning anything, from shovels to iPads, suitcases to drills.

Share in your commmunity: StreetBank fosters community engagement and altruism by allowing you to share and borrow within your neighbourhood. 

Want to do this action? Head over to our list of Doers to find someone to pledge for.

[1] Ecomodo

[2] Story of Stuff

20% 

of Christmas gifts are unwanted and laid to waste.

Be they clothes, books, films, electronics, or cosmetics, they’re all made from something, and something pretty precious.

Climate change

Greenhouse gases are emitted from every stage of the lifecycle of your household goods, from extracting, refining, transporting and processing the raw materials, right through to landfilling the finished product.

80kg CO2 is emitted by the production of unwanted Christmas gifts given by the average adult in the UK.

Love

Love your things, love your friends. Nothing means quite as much as a home made gift, or even a home made card. Especially if it’s made out of things that you’ve already given some love, that you’re reusing and re-loving.

How?

No matter how creative you are, there are endless options, you could make:

• a necklace or earrings by re-stringing old beads
• a bag out of an old pair of jeans
• a cushion out of old curtain material or other scraps
• a pin board out of wine corks
• a mix tape (ok, a playlist is probably more appropriate!)
• a collection of your favourite recipes
• a tetrapak wallet

You can alos take at look at Instructables, a cool website that guides you through how to make pretty much anything! 

Kirstie Allsopp is a well of ideas and inspiration for all things homemade, check out her great book, Kirstie's Homemade Home. 

 

Want to do this action? Head over to our

list of Doers to find someone to pledge for.

Litter

We’ve all seen plastic bags stuck in tree tops and empty bottles lying among the autumn leaves, but not many of us have seen the great pacific garbage patch for ourselves – a plastic soup in our ocean twice the size of France.

Our waste manages to find its way into every corner of our world, but unlike most other waste, plastic does not biodegrade.

6:1

The trash vortex in the Pacific is the size of Texas, with an estimated six kilos of plastic for every kilo of natural plankton

Every piece of plastic ever made is still on the planet somewhere.

Convenience

Spend less time cutting through layers of plastic and emptying your overflowing bins, and more time living.

How?

Avoid buying over-packaged goods

Use a reusable shopping bag

Buy loose veg/fruit instead of packaged produce

Use tap water instead of bying bottled

Check out Lexy's blog for even more creative ideas!

 

 

 

Want to do this action? Head over to our list of Doers to find someone to pledge for.

Got other tips or great resources to share? Please email them over to us at

1 - Plastics - WRAP

2 - Plastic bags and bottles - CO₂ emissions

3 - Rubbish and Shopping (Global Action Plan)

Landfills

Landfill space is in short supply, they’re filling up fast and none of us wants a new one on our doorstep. The advent of ‘fast fashion’ has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of clothes sent to landfill – each of us now throws around 30Kg of textiles in the bin each year – that’s the equivalent of 120 T-shirts.

Charities sell un-wearable clothes as stuffing and rags, so even if that t-shirt has faded, stained and ripped, it’s still got value.

Child labour and working conditions

We’ve all heard of sweatshops. You may not have seen one, but the chances are you’ve worn their produce. With stylishly embroidered tops costing as little as £6, there’s little chance of a fair wage being earned by all.

This has been the focus of campaigns for decades, and thankfully they’re beginning to pay off. But it’s pretty difficult for retailers to monitor a string of subcontractors and suppliers all around the world, so sadly the unfairness hasn’t been completely uncovered.

Money

The average Brit spends £780 a year on clothes. By buying better-made, longer-lasting clothes you could save yourself a lot of money - even if it means spending a little more upfront.

And by shopping around in the charity shops and swapping clothes with friends, you could save even more!

How?

1. Clothes swap: Find or host a Swishing party: invite your friends over and ask them to bring a lovely but unloved piece of clothing or two so that someone else can fall in love with it. Everyone goes home with a revived wardrobe and full wallets. Find out more here.

2. Charity shop: Take a gander around your local charity shop, you might just be in for a surprise. Check out where they are through this charity shop listing.

3. Buy to last: If you really can’t resist buying something new, make sure it’s made to last, and under fair working conditions. And if it’s cotton, make it organic cotton. Check out our friends over at People Tree, for example who create sustainable and ethical clothing. You can also see loads of top tips on how to love your clothes with the Love your Clothes campaign. 

Want to do this action? Head over to our list of Doers to find someone to pledge for.

Got other tips or great resources to share? Please email them over to us at

 

1 - Well Dressed?.pdf

2 - Berners-Lee, M (2010) How Bad Are Bananas?

3 - Water and Cotton - Environmental Justice Foundation

4 - Aral Sea Story - National Geographic

 

 

 

 

How?

1.     Buy yourself a reusable bottle

2.     Fill it up

3.     Drink.

While on the go, ask nicely and cafes, restaurants, pubs, bars will fill it up for you. GiveMe Tap helps you out with this.

Buy one of their snazzy bottles and not only does half the money go towards water projects in Africa, but they have teamed up with cafes, restaurants and bars across the country to make sure you can re-fill your bottle whilst on the move. 

Funky collabsable bottle Ohyo is great for those wanting to lighten the load. Once done with your water, simply compress the bottle down - and it can fit in your pocket!

Ohyo are also making it easier for you to top up your bottle with Find-a Fountain, an exciting new campaign aimed at increasing the amount of drinking fountains available to the public. If your tap water doesn’t tickle your taste buds, get yourself a jug or on-tap filter. However you do it, it's time to Tap it.

Want to do this action? Head over to our list of Doers to find someone to pledge for. 

Got other tips or great resources to share? Please email them over to us at 

1 - Earth-Policy.org

2 - http://www.theplastiki.com/

3 - Berners-Lee, M (2010). How Bad are Bananas?

4 - BBC - Panorama

5 - Independent.co.uk Lifestyle - Food and Drink