He’s doing it in a dress … again

So as you probably know, I’ve developed a bit of an unhealthy obsession with wearing school dresses over the last twelve months.  It’s all due to my friend Chantelle and the rest of the wonderful people at One Girl.

In August last year, I drank coffee, played basketball and posed awkwardly in a dress on a chilly Melbourne morning.

A couple of months later I donned the dress again, firstly to wear around my office building and then to run 21km on a day filled with smiles and sweat patches.

My silliness raised over $1500 to put girls in Sierra Leone back in school.  I think a little embarrassment was worth an education for six girls for a year, don’t you?

To help raise awareness and money for this year’s campaign, I jumped off a bridge in a school dress last month, then shoulder-tapped a few hundred people at a party to give generously.  Which they did.

And now it’s time to do it again – with your help.

My birthday is coming up, and in less than three weeks, I’ll be officially old.  Fortunately I’ll be sailing on a yacht off the Turkish coast at the time, so it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll too worried about the passing of another year.  Or that I’ll be able to remember much about it, come to that.

For fourteen days I’ll be bobbing up and down.  Raising and lowering sails.  Tying knots.  Throwing out the anchor.  Swimming in the ocean.  Using all manner of nautical terms that I don’t really understand.

All in a school dress.

Given that I’m sailing with seven other people who love nothing more than to see me embarrassed, I expect there will be a lot of photos that come out of this little expedition.  I’ll post the best/worst of them on the blog, Facebook etc once I get back to dry land.

And in return for making a fool of myself once more, I’d like your help to put girls through school again this year.  If you’ve enjoyed the 350+ posts I’ve published on this site over the last three years, and you’d like to give something back, now’s the time.

Call it a birthday present.  Call it an act of generosity for girls in Sierra Leone – girls who are currently more likely to be sexually assaulted than attend high school.  Call it whatever you like, to be honest.

Just help out.

It’s really very easy to do – just go to the Do it in a Dress site and click the nice big "Donate" button.  The amount is up to you, but to give you some idea, it only costs $20 to put a girl in school for a month.  Give up coffee for a week and you’ve got that covered.

If there’s some particularly embarrassing request that you’d like to accompany your donation, feel free to include it.  I make no promises, but if it’s silly enough, there’s a good chance that there’ll be a picture of it coming your way.

If you’d like to help out even more, sign up to do something embarrassing in a dress yourself, and start fundraising.  It’s an amazing cause, and an incredibly fun campaign to be a part of.

Ok, that’s it from me.

Thanks for being awesome.