20 for 20 challenge – join us!

To help celebrate our 20 years of impact we would love our supporters to get behind our 20 for 20 challenge!

Perfect for all ages and abilities because what your 20 is, is completely up to you! Ambitious or easy, creative or challenging – you can help make such a difference to the children and young people who will be able to go to school or college thanks to you!

Do your 20 solo or with family, friends, your school class, colleagues or teammates.

Check out some of our ideas below – and we would love to support you so do let us know that you are taking part. We can help you get set up, share Just Giving templates for your fundraising, brainstorm more ideas, cheer you on and help make your 20 truly count. We will also invite you to our 20 for 20 Challenge FB group and WhatsApp group to help you connect with our other 20 for 20 challengers. Complete your details below so we can get you signed up:

Feeling energetic? Here’s some ideas for the active:

• Do 20 sit ups for 20 days and ask 20 people to sponsor you £1 per day. That’s £400 – which could pay for a vulnerable child in Uganda to go to school for a year and get a daily nutritious school meal every day.
• 20 star jumps every morning for the rest of the year, popping a penny in a jar every time and see how much you can raise before 2027!
• Swim 20 lengths, once? Every week? Once a month? Imagine how quickly you raise money if someone sponsored you 20p for each length.
• Run, Walk or Cycle a 20…
  • 20 miles on a day you choose in 2026 – getting family and friends to sponsor you… if you raise £120 you can pay for a child in Lesotho to go to high school for a year
  • 20 miles once every month in 2026 – imagine the sponsorship you could raise with that!
  • 20 miles over a week of your choosing – asking your friends and families to sponsor an amount of their choosing. Every penny counts: 35p pays for a hot nutritious school meal giving a child the energy to learn.

Up for something more adventurous?

• Try 20 new things in 2026 – anything goes, cook something new, visit a gym if you haven’t tried before, a new hairstyle, listen to a new podcast, pet a scary spider, ride a horse, abseil off a tall building, etc… set yourself a target to raise and get family and friends to support you.
• Stay awake for 20 hours and count backwards from 100 each hour – why not?
  • Live stream it and get people to donate (if you love social media of course – and if it’s out of your comfort zone it is another reason your loved ones will want to sponsor you!)
  • If 20 people sponsor you 20p per hour that’s £80 and can pay for one of the poorest children at our partner school in Uganda to eat well for an entire year!

Arts and crafts or cooking more your thing? Get making!

• Turn your crafty side into a sale of 20! Whatever your skillset, hobby or passion, make 20 items and sell them at your local craft market. Sold at £5 each this would raise £100! That’s a term at secondary school for a disadvantaged child in Lesotho.
• Bake 20 cupcakes and sell them for £1 each – that’s £20 which can pay for 57 school meals for one of the poorest students at our partner school in Uganda.

Want to support but short on time?

• Simply donate £20 – or make it £20 for every month in 2026 – that’s a total of £240 and can pay for books, stationery and school uniform for two street children in Kenya without which they would be unable to attend school.
• Buy £20 of raffle tickets in our Young Art Oxford Exhibition raffle before 22^nd May 2026. You can win amazing prizes and donate 14 school meals in one quick go! Click here to enter our raffle.
• Head to our social media and like 20 of our posts – you are helping fuel the algorithms meaning more people will discover us! Who knows who might feel an affinity with our work and decide to support us?

Get your school involved – we love to see children supporting other children!

• Invite pupils to an ‘Impact 20’ art competition
  • Ask them to submit artwork or photos with the theme ‘impact’, they decide what that means to them.
  • Their impact themed art could represent things like education, environment, kindness, explosive energy or things that are important to them in their daily life.
  • Choose a local hero as your judge and let them select 20 winning pieces which are then combined into a collage.
  • Give the students A6 sheets of paper, so that you can fit 20 winning pieces onto an A1 cardboard sheet in a 5 x 4 landscape grid.
  • Turn it into a fundraiser by asking for £1 donation to enter the competition and then maybe auction off the final collage to parents or local businesses!
• Host a 20 laps fun run – students and staff run 20 laps of the school playing field and ask parents and partners to sponsor them 20p per lap – that’s £4 per ‘fun runner’ and can pay for 2 weeks of hot, nutritious school meals for one of the poorest children at our partner school in Uganda.
• We would love to talk to you in your school assembly to share just how important your support is and what we will be able to do for our scholars with the funds you raise!

Get your colleagues together and join in!

• Host a lunchtime “Decades Dancefloor” hour playing hit number 1s from 2006 to 2026.
  • Prizes for best moves and a donation of their choice to take part – helping to raise funds for us.
  • 20 colleagues, average of £20 donation each – that’s £400 in one groovy lunch hour! This can pay for half a year at university for a young person in Uganda helping them on their way to a rewarding career, and a dignified life out of poverty.
• Competitive colleagues? How about a 20 hour endurance challenge where a team swim, walk, run for 20 hours and get sponsorship?
  • Run it like a relay or 20 simultaneous hours for 20 colleagues. Challenge your boss to take on a 20-hour stint by themselves, sponsor them and cheer them on. You decide!
  • Set a target to raise £2,000 and pay for 20 students in Lesotho to go to high school for an entire year!

None of these ideas grab you but you still want to support our 20 for 20 in some way? Visit our fundraising pack for more inspiration. You can also find other ways to support us and get involved here.

Whatever you choose to do as your 20 – your efforts will be immensely appreciated by the young lives impacted. This is what being given the opportunity to attend school and get an education means to our scholars and graduates, in the words of Linet, Rafiki Thabo scholar in Kenya:

Our 20 Years of Impact

Finding ourselves in our 20th year of impact we continue to reflect on what our supporters have made possible over these two decades. From the early years when our founding trustees as university students themselves passionately supported a handful of scholars through to the 419 children and young people who are now in secondary school, college, or university with our support this year.

Thanks to our supporters’ loyalty, we have grown sustainably and with care, always making sure that when we take on a new scholar, we can commit to supporting them throughout their education. Always remaining true to our very core of being a close-knit, lean, and transparent organisation working through the local committees made up of people known personally to our founding trustees from those early days – helping us ensure that your donations support the children and young people with the greatest need.

Over the past 20 years we have:

• Supported 961 children and young people through education, enabling them to fulfil their life opportunities and make their dreams come true
• Provided at least 163,800 school meals to students at a secondary school in rural Uganda who would otherwise go hungry
• Helped four partner schools to improve the learning environment for many thousands of children who have attended those schools. Over the years, we have built, renovated and extended dormitories, provided teachers’ accommodation, built toilet blocks, improved electricity and water supply, installed solar panels, equipped IT and science labs, and supported income generation projects such as piggeries, chicken coops and fishponds
• Reduced the barriers to education for children with disabilities, for example by providing them with assistive devices to enable them to attend school, providing their mothers with flexible income generating opportunities, training parents of autistic children to provide their children with therapy, restoring a hydrotherapy pool and supporting specialist autism units.

With your continued support we will be here for another 20 years and beyond!

Here are some of the scholars we have supported in the last 20 years – read their stories to appreciate the enormous impact education has had on their lives.