Strange Days Indeed

It has been a very long and decidedly strange day. I've been busy preparing for a training session I'm delivering tomorrow for community groups on how to raise funds without applying to trusts and foundations and kept coming back again and again to own my experiences with a charity that has raised over £140,000, helped build a primary school in Haryana in northern India and never once filled out a grant application form.

The charity is the Buwan Kothi International Trust (BKIT) and the result of all its hard work is the Gilly Mundy Memorial Community School, which is named after my great friend, former INQUEST colleague and Newham Monitoring Project comrade who died on St Patrick's Day 2007. Gilly was only 36 and today has been weird because it would have been his fortieth birthday.

My own fortieth in 2008 was such a blast that I can well imagine the party we would have had to celebrate - the big fella really loved a party. So it's been rather a sad day, although the business of thinking about what I'm going to say tomorrow has been a reminder that even tragedy can help create something incredibly special - here's more on what Gilly's friends and family have managed to achieve: