Tithing, an update and some perspectives on ‘doing good stuff’

Back in March I wrote a short blog post about the direction I was looking to take Totaal in as a company. In it I spoke about crowd-sourcing an ethical policy and the concept I called “tithing” where I give 10% of my time, roughly equating to half a day a week, to doing things for free with people who needed help but couldn’t afford to pay.

Since that post things have moved on considerably and I felt I’d revisit the concept and update regular readers on the progress of what I then thought would be a nice little initiative but has since turned into a slightly bigger one.

The first thing to mention is that off of the back of this post I began to run the Bradford Social Media Surgeries which have been a really interesting side project. We’ve done two so far, in July and September, and I have been lucky enough to meet some really interesting people along the way. Also, thank you to all of the people who gave their free time to come along and act as ‘surgeons’ on the day, not to mention those that were good enough to give me lots of good, not to mention free, PR for the event. Social media Surgeries are aimed specifically at Third Sector companies (Those in the Voluntary, Community, Charity and Social Enterprise sectors) and that in itself brings its own set of challenges. For instance, how do you help a women’s refuge enter into a conversation with potential service users when their whole business revolves around confidentiality? It’s certainly not a challenge you face every day in the more straightforward corporate world.

Probably the biggest project I’ve been involved with, both in terms of scale and time, has been Fire Walk With Me, a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the original – and still only – airing of Twin Peaks. Although largely inspired by the work of David Lynch the event, which took place on the 18th of September, became more of a Warholian affair, bursting at the seems with interesting films, people in costumes, live music performances. In short, it was a rather beautiful night and well worth investing some time in. It was all to raise funds for Temple Works in Leeds which is a lovely listed former mill building which is modelled on the Temple of Horus at Edfu in Egypt and has morphed, via a short period of virtual dereliction, into an arts venue like no other.