The Guy Fox Blog

#14. Coins & Paper Currency This Guy Fox money is just one example of the resources we design for our workshops. To bring a topic to life, we believe in making it real for the children.   Who’re we kidding? Making these resources is fun, too!   When we get the nod for a new project, we put on our thinking caps and our scarves of imagination. We consider the project topic from all angles, and we ask ourselves, what do we need to do to bring this to life for a 10-year old? Props, activities, costumes, resources… what does this topic demand?   For example, to explore the history of Lloyd’s of London, we turned a classroom in Brick Lane into a 17th century coffee shoppe. Our volunteers dressed as ship owners who needed to insure their cargos; the children became underwriters, deciding which risks to underwrite and then negotiating the premiums.    Our facilitator, in costume as Edward Lloyd, sold coffee and rang a bell when it was time to announce the shipping n...

#3. Blue Trolley (May 2000) What you see here is our Transportation Department – our battered, beloved blue trolley.  When Kourtney applied for that grant from the Peabody Trust ( Object #2 ), she included a budget. Having never done a funding budget before, there were bound to be some mistakes.   Indeed, that budget wasn’t even a twig compared to the robust, well-researched budgets that we submit in our funding applications now. It guesstimated the various line items and confidently stated: “I will re-work / re-design the project to accommodate the funding which is made available to me.” For Distribution Costs, Kourtney guessed ‘£200 to £300’. After all, how much could it cost to send out 5,000 magazines to 65 primary schools? Well. A lot more than you might expect.  (In fact, distribution is one of our most expensive activities. Often,  SENDING  a Guy Fox book is double the cost of  PRINTING  one! ) As we said, there w...