Austerity! Multimillionaire supermodel Lily Cole received a £200k government grant for her 'wishing' website
The Government assures us that substantial spending cuts are the only way to "balance the books". It doesn't want to slash the funding of non-profit organisations providing essential services to vulnerable groups, but "difficult choices" have to be made - so cut them some slack, OK?
Sure, it could have avoided legal aid cuts that will deny many people access to justice, or prevented steep increases in rough sleeping as a result of slashing funding to homelessness services. But then how would we afford the really important stuff?
Stuff like Lily Cole's new website, impossible.com
As Lily explained (at great length) in her somewhat verbose Comment is Free article yesterday, the website is basically a combination of Freecycle and Noel Edmonds favourite The Secret. Only it's loads more clever and important because it's based on her Cambridge undergraduate thesis, and conversations she had with various wise, foreign and/or poor people.
The idea is that people post their "wishes", then other individuals benevolently make them come true. Lily hopes to foster a "gift economy" not as an alternative to capitalism (she's very clear that she is not anti-capitalist, indeed Impossible is set up as a profit-making business) but as some sort of supplement to it.
Here are some examples of recent wishes made on the site:
Somewhat ambitious...
More ambitious...
Whoa. Still, nothing wrong with dreaming big.
Control a cat's behaviour?? Let's not get carried away!
Hopefully there are some people on the site who can make these wonderful dreams come true!
Lily's belief in the "gift paradigm" is perhaps not surprising, given she herself was recently gifted £200,000 of taxpayers' money by the Cabinet Office’s Innovation in Giving fund
£200k could go a long way in a lot of different places, so we're glad the government feels confident making "tough decisions" about the most expedient way to allocate funding.
Still, it's a shame there isn't some more money to go around, so that slightly less brilliant (but still important) projects didn't have to close.
But perhaps the "gift economy" can provide the solution! We've tried making a few wishes ourselves on Lily's website. Fingers crossed...
Can you grant this wish? Pop over to impossible.com and let us know.
Think you might be able to help with this? Head over to impossible.com!
Think you can keep the camp open? You know what to do.
We strongly encourage all non-profit organisations facing funding issues to try a similar tactic. If it wasn't a good idea, why would the Government have allocated so much money to it?
