Feed A Smile – Ciaran Laval

Friday September 25th sees the start of a three day celebrity auction in Second Life with the aim to raise funds to help build more classrooms for a school in Kenya. I’m talking about the country of Kenya here, not a region in Second Life!

The celebrity auction is associated with an official charity, Feed a Smile, Live and Learn in Kenya. The charity has been active in Second Life since 2010 and was featured in episode 16 of The Drax Files : World Makers.

This weekend’s event is getting some support from other Second Life residents, most notably in the form of MadPea Games who have been blogging about this for some time. A recent blog post explains how the event has been gathering momentum as they announced; We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat! :

Since we released the video from the school in Kenya that we’re fundraising for we’ve had even more well known residents sign up to put themselves on the Auction Block for our star-studded Celebrity Auction. We even have 2 Lindens put their brave avatars forward for the challenge!

I’ll also embed the video at the end of this post.

Continue reading “Celebrity Auction To Help Build More Classrooms For A School In Kenya To Be Held In Second Life This Weekend”

Episode 16 of The Drax Files finds Draxtor Despres speaking to Brique Topaz (Second Life name) who raises money for the Live and Learn in Kenya charity and their Feed A Smile programme. As usual I’ll embed the video at the end of the post. The video touches upon the variety of ways that the charity raises funds and also talks of how some folk weren’t that convinced about the prospects of raising money via a virtual world …. until they saw the money rolling in!

The charity have a club, The Lavender Field, where artists perform for free, with their tips going to the charity. We see artists from different parts of the world projecting themselves through their real self into their virtual self to perform at the club. There are a number of singers featured and unfortunately I don’t know their names.

Brique points out that 100 Linden Dollars will feed a child for a day, that works out to around 30 US cents. Some singers have better followings than others, Brique cites one popular singer who in an hour will generate tips that will pay for 800 meals. However Brique will welcome any singer, it all adds up.

The board of directors were not at all convinced about Second Life, indeed Brique says that “They are no longer against Second Life“, suggesting there were some doubts regarding the venture. This is why The Drax Files is such a good platform for Second Life and other virtual worlds, people do not realise quite how powerful virtual worlds can be. In this case, Brique explains that Second Life is raising around 1,000 Euros every month and paying for around a third of all meals via this venture, pretty impressive and heart warming stuff.

Continue reading “The Drax Files Episode 16 – Feed A Smile”