London youth charities Kids Company and MyGeneration are the first charities to benefit from unprecedented exposure in the Metro newspaper’s new Urban Action campaigning website.
The free UK-wide publication, with a circulation of 1.34 million, has launched the site to “help charities to help others” around the UK and led with the announcement in its newspaper this morning.
Readers are being asked to support Kids Company by buying 'neurons' in a virtual brain on the site at £5 a time. They can be customised onlinewith a photo and message to send to networking sites. My Generation is asking readers to take part in fundraising events or work placements.
The Urban Action site aims initially to raise enough money to fund a new Kids Company centre in one of the 33 cities where Metro is distributed, and to fund a minibus to act as a mobile centre for My Generation.
Kids Company provides practical, emotional and educational support to inner-city children and young adults while My Generation provides support for the development of key skills to young people.
Metro will now work in partnership with the charities to advertise their campaigns, come up with new fundraising ideas and get involved in various volunteering projects throughout the year and aims to add to its charity portfolio in the future.
The newspaper worked with the Charities Trust to choose its first charity partners. After suggesting a wish-list of the types of charities it wanted to work with, the Metro received a list from the Trust of those that fitted the brief before choosing a shortlist and finally inviting the charities to present to the Urban Action team.
MyGeneration hit the headlines during the recent election when one of its founders Shaun Bailey ran as Conservative parliamentary candidate for Hammersmith. In what was described by Bailey as a Labour 'smear' it was revealed that £16,000 of spending through MyGeneration was unaccounted for. Bailey put the discrepancy down to bad administration at a time when the charity had a staff of just two.
