The Good for Nothing movement is a tricky one to explain and not because it’s particularly complicated, in fact the opposite is true. Get a bunch of smart, motivated and talented people in the same room as some great local causes with exciting challenges, give them a short deadline and see what happens. Explaining it can be tricky because people usually ask where’s the catch, and there isn’t one, honestly! It’s free for the do-ers, it’s free for the causes, it’s free for us to host events, and most importantly it’s not a cult.
It’s doing good, for nothing.
Good for Nothing is an international community of thinkers, do-ers, makers and tinkerers applying their skills and energy to help cause-led innovators and change makers. It’s about diverse groups of people collaborating together, working in new, fast, fun and exciting ways by supporting ideas, people and causes that are leading the way to what a better society might look like.
GFN is all about doing, not talking. With events taking the form of 3 hour socials and 24 or 48 hour gigs there’s no time to mess about. Think big, self organise, prototype quickly and divide and conquer. If it isn’t working, take another look. Still not working? Ditch it. Not feeling useful in the group you’re working with? Someone else will be crying out for your skills. Out of hectic chaos will emerge some amazing stuff, or everything will explode. It doesn’t matter, just do.
Colchester already has a rich, talented community of thinkers, do-ers, makers, hackers and everything in between, so when the GFN Mothership put out the call for people to start new chapters to build on the work already being done in cities like London, Manchester and Bristol we didn’t need asking twice.
Gaz and I took the bait and found ourselves in an old farm in Norfolk where we spent the weekend finding out a bit more about how GFN works, getting tips on running gigs and socials, and of course, DOING! After experiencing the energy of the GFN way of working with some incredibly talented people on some really cool briefs we were totally sold. As were Ed and Oli, our partners in Nothing, when we got back to base and told them all about it. We had already begun planning our first gig before we’d made it home!
We are holding our very first social this Thursday at the St Botolph’s Waiting Room from 7:30pm. We’ll be talking a little about what GFN is, how things work, what our plans are for our first gig in November and hearing a little about the causes we’ve got lined up.
But of course it’s all about doing not talking so come prepared to do Good For Nothing in the form of a super quick half-hour-hack on some briefs from the Waiting Room itself. If you haven’t already been bitten, by the end of those 30minutes you’ll have the GFN bug.
Let’s do some good in our ‘hood.
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