A cut-out from a newspaper piece on one of the very first Day for Change events at Fazakerley Community Comprehensive.
Courtesy of A. Finnegan
UNICEF’s Day for Change dates back to 1989, when Melanie Rees initiated the first UNICEF national non-uniform day.
Melanie and her Year 9 tutor group at Fazakerley Community Comprehensive School in Merseyside organised a fundraising day for UNICEF. The day involved children being able to attend school without their school uniforms, and paying a donation to UNICEF to do this. Melanie contacted her LEA to encourage other schools to take part and the event was an enormous success, involving 500 schools and raising over £50,000. She, and her class, administered the day.
Since then, UNICEF has organised an annual school fundraising event based on this success called ‘Day for Change’. Today, Day for Change has become a fundraising event in which more than 4,000 schools take part around the UK. Although most schools still hold a traditional non-uniform day, many choose their own variants which include mad hair days, wearing pyjamas and slippers to school, crazy hats or dressing up in the colours of the flags of the Day for Change theme countries of each year. But the most important thing is that children change something about their day to help children in the two countries that Day for Change will benefit. Hence, the phrase Day for Change can be used to highlight the “change” of UK school children by doing something different, as well as perhaps the actual “change” they collect, which, once added up, will provide much-needed funding for each Day for Change country to develop their UNICEF projects.
UNICEF’s Day for Change provides an opportunity for school children in the UK to learn about other countries and UNICEF’s work, as well as providing a starting point to compare and contrast their lives with those of children in other countries and understand the underlying similarities in terms of interests and aspirations of children of their own ages. UNICEF is very grateful to Melanie Rees for setting up UNICEF’s first national non-uniform day, setting a milestone for Day for Change to evolve into a large-scale national fundraising day throughout the UK.
