Fair Trade Electives is delighted to announce that Grace and Emma from Dundee University are the winners of the 2025 FTE Fundraising Award. This award recognises students whose fundraising efforts are inspiring, innovative, and exemplary and which showcaseapproaches that others may wish to follow. T
Their quiz night raised an impressive £750 for Gahini District Hospital in Rwanda. As award recipients, Grace and Emma received £100 towards their elective costs, recognising both their commitment and the positive impact of their fundraising for Gahini District Hospital.
Read on to find out more about their fundraising!
Grace and Emma’s fundraising
In preparation for our medical elective, we organised a fundraising event to support Gahini District Hospital in Rwanda, the hospital where we will undergo our elective. Understanding the importance of giving back to the community that will host us, we were determined to approach this effort with dedication and careful planning. Alongside studying for our upcoming medical school finals we needed to be smart about how we organised so that the night would be a success.
After a significant amount of brainstorming, we opted to host a charity quiz night. We began planning this event several weeks in advance, meeting regularly to divide tasks and ensure nothing was overlooked. Whilst one of us took responsibility for organising the venue and contacting local businesses for raffle prize donations, the other worked at promoting the event on social media and handling ticket sales, we then regrouped to write the quiz questions together – including a special round dedicated to Rwandan trivia. We hosted 5 rounds with the raffle sandwiched in the middle to break up the evening, we both enjoyed hosting the quiz rounds, making sure there was no cheating going on and evoked some healthy rivalry between quiz teams.
We contacted just under 40 local and nationwide businesses, several of which were very supportive of our efforts and donated prizes ranging from gift vouchers to salon treatments and restaurant meals. Alongside this we purchased extra prizes which led to an enticing raffle that secured us extra donations, so enticing in fact that we ran out of raffle tickets! We had to make some extra ones out of spare paper (our problem solving skills put to use to raise an extra couple of pounds).
The event was hosted at a local student pub, who kindly did not charge us for hosting, and even donated a prize to our raffle! We received a strong turnout from friends, family and members of the public and managed to raise over £750 from the quiz, raffle tickets and donations from others that weren’t able to make it.
We finished the quiz and thanked everyone for coming. At times we were worried about the turnout due to the timing being around exams and we were both spending lots of time in the library too. It was a lovely evening to take our minds off this in the end and start thinking about the experience of the elective that we are lucky enough to take part in.
Thanks to the combined efforts of our planning, teamwork, and community support, the evening was a huge success both in raising funds and bringing people together for a good cause.