check out their shiny new blog at http://darebulgaria.wordpress.com/ and keep your eyes peeled for the events they have lined up in the future.

Click the following link to download the form. > dare project form

Team Kenya 2010 at the summit of Kilimanjaro.

So last Monday was D.A.R.E’s very last official meeting before summer, unfortunately nobody came to let us into G6 so we held the meeting in the corridor outside.

Apart from our goodbye bbq on Sunday thats pretty much it folks. Another DARE year has come and gone, but it has been one fantastic year!

• Back in SEPTEMBER 2009 DARE kicked off the new semester with its first meeting and PR’ing at the freshers fair. Some awesome PR’ing tactics seem to have gone on that day: with ‘old school DARE’ manning the stall and some newer members, recently back from projects, forming our very own DARE street team. A fab day was had and at the next meetings our room was full to standing with loads of new and enthusiastic DARE members.

• OCTOBER 16th was the day of the DARE ball. This year we moved it to the Invercarse Hotel as they had a bigger dance floor and a bigger bar.  We were lucky enough to have the, very fantastic, Dundee University Big Band playing for us. After much eating, drinking and dancing we minibus’d it to the Union for more drinking and dancing plus lots and lots of fun! Later on in the month teams who had been on projects over summer helped to review the current projects and discuss how they could be made even better for future groups. As well as this several presentation nights were held to give the rest of DARE and new members an Idea of what we’d all been up to over summer.
  

• NOVEMBER was a busy busy month for dare. We celebrated St Andrews Day with the St. Andrews Ceilidh at the Queen’s hotel. Music for the night was provided by The Haggis Chasers and again we all headed to the Union afterwards for more dancing and fun. Mid November also saw four of our members travel all the way down to Bristol for SVOP, a few weeks later we had get together in which they reported back with everything they had learnt. DARE AWARE also held an evening event discussing the topic of victims of torture. The evening was very informative and really well attended, thanks to the DARE AWARE team for sorting that out. Figuring the last day of November was a good time to get into the Christmas spirit, DARE celebrated christmas with the annual Christmas Dinner held in Breas and again this was a highly enjoyable and entertaining evening. In November a lot of fundraising was also done by the teams heading off to Romania and Kenya at christmas – bake sales and Pub Quizzes all the way!

• DECEMBER saw DARE hit the pavement outside Borders for some very enthusiastic but slightly musically challenged carol singing. Armed only with our dreams and a small tambourine, we sold cakes and sung our hearts out. Over three different days of singing, selling and endurance of the winter weather we had managed to fundraise over £200 which was then added to our fundraising account. A MASSIVE thank you has to go to all that baked cakes for us and sang over those dates. December was also the month which saw the beginning of our very successful partnership with READ International. READ is a charity which aims to provide African schools with second hand textbooks. Boxes were placed around campus and the book collecting began. After Uni had finished for christmas our teams heading to Kenya and Romania jetted off to work at there chosen Projects. And that was the end of semester one.

• The first DARE event of JANUARY was the legendary DARE Abseil! Over the course of about 4 hours over 50 volunteers abseiled down the side of the 130ft Tower Building. MASSIVE thanks have to go to all the volunteers and those who sponsored them. We raised over £4000 in just the one day which was such an unbelievably fantastic achievement, so GO DARE! Strait after the abseil we headed to the Union to PR at the re-freshers fair and In the evening we held our Burns night Ceilidh at the queens hotel. Over the course of the rest of January we put out and collected the application forms for our summer projects. So all in all January was a pretty successful month.

• FEBRUARY was a pretty quiet month all in all. It began with the interviews for our summer projects: on Saturday the 6th we took over floor 4 in the union with a morning of games, challenges and interviews. A few days later teams had been made up and, for most, planing for summer could officially begin. On Valentines Day a few volunteers hit the pubs of Perth Road to gather some fundraising by selling Kisses an at the end of February we had the very first READ book sort.

• On the evening of MARCH the 8th DARE held its AGM. It was a fun evening with lots of laughs and by the end we had a brand new, shiny committee. Over the next few weeks it was full steam ahead preparing for JAM WRESTLING but between all the hype and excitement we managed to squeeze in a very successful pub quiz for READ International which raised £230 and some fundraising face-painting on St Paddy’s Day. This year Jam Wrestling moved to the new venue of Fat Sam’s Live. Mid March and the big Jammy event was drawing near: we had our wrestlers, we had a pool and the PR team were working on advertising the event. Unfortunately we had no Jam!!! After much discussion, panic and consideration of a jam-jelly hybrid we eventually managed to convince suppliers to provide us with all the jam we could wish for. On the 24th March a crowd gathered in Fat Sam’s to watch our volunteers wrestle in the big pool of Jam. March was also the month of a proposed ceilidh. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a venue to hold the event, so the ceilidh became a social night and the social night became a lovely dinner at 25′s. At the Dinner the very first Honouree memberships were handed out.  These awards are handed out to previous members of DARE who have previously played a significant part in the development if the society. This year the awards were given to Philip Engelholm and Iain Mclellan.

• After the busyness of March, APRIL was pretty quiet. Our teams continued to fundraise for summer projects and as a society DARE decided to collectively vote NO in the Universities NUS referendum.

• MAY is now nearly over and all our teams are getting ready to set off on there summer adventures. After a highly successful Year READ international held its second book sort. It had now been decided that READ should separate from DARE and become its very own society, so good luck READ!!! Last of all DARE won SOCIETY OF THE YEAR FOR THE THIRD YEAR RUNNIG at the DUSA awards dinner on the 15th May which was the perfect end to a fantastic year!

MASSIVE THANKS AND CREDIT HAVE TO GO TO EVERYONE WHO PLAYED A PART IN HELPING WITH DARE GOINGS ON THIS LAST YEAR AND GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE GOING ON PROJECTS IN THE COMING MONTHS!!!

Best of luck to the new committee who, as of this evening, are ‘the new faces of dare’ we have a really strong team this year so lets make it fantastic!

To all our members graduating/leaving Dundee this year, including Rimple, Anna and our fantastic president Rachel, thank you so much for all you’ve done and best of luck for the future. Keep in contact – theres no getting away that easily! xxxx

And to anyone considering joining DARE next semester or thinking of applying for one of our future projects:

DO IT, IT WILL BE AMAZING!!!!!!

Read International is a UK Charity that collect and sort school books here in the UK, for shipment to schools in Uganda and Tanzania.

Through a community of student-run READ Book Projects, we mobilise university students to collect disused, high-quality Key Stage 3 and GCSE textbooks from UK secondary schools. Our student volunteers give presentations to schools pupils to promote student volunteering, young social enterprise, recycling and global citizenship.

To date, READ Book Projects have donated over 564,000 textbooks to 580 Tanzanian secondary schools and twelve regional libraries.

At present there is a Campus Book Drive project running in Dundee (organised by the DARE Society), and due to the major success of the project we want to expand so that we can collect even more books and help even more school children in East Africa.

We are currently recruiting 4 project leaders(volunteers) who will oversee the project and have different roles and responsibilities. We will also need a team of enthusiastic volunteers to help with their work over the year.

If you are interested in becoming part of this project/society then please get in contact us, as we need to get the ball rolling before we split for the summer break.

You can get more info at the link below:
http://www.readinternational.org.uk/read_book_projects/how_does_it_work_/

Please email us if you are interested in this very worthwhile project:
dundee@readbookproject.org.uk

Education is the key to helping children in East Africa break free of the poverty cycle, and this is your opportunity to help provide that key!

DARE HAS WON SOCIETY OF THE YEAR FOR THE THIRD TIME IN A ROW!

Mega thanks to everyone in DARE, past and present, for being so awesome and helping to make this happen!

If anyone would like to apply for a place on one of our Christmas projects, either to Romania or Kenya, could you please e-mail the DARE account soon.

We are hoping to recruit volunteers for these projects early, since a basic knowledge of the Romanian language is needed prior to going on the Romania project and flights need to be booked early for the Kenya project to get the cheapest prices.