Toilet Twinning Initiative

by Jennifer Skipp

During Lent, an initiative was suggested by the church to raise money to enable the ‘twinning’ of the church room toilets. The idea was for people to donate any money they saved by giving up luxuries such as chocolate, coffee or alcohol during Lent.

Toilet Twinning is a charity which invites people to ‘twin’ their own toilet with one in a poor community. This is a way of raising funds to enable people in the poorest nations to have clean water and a proper toilet, and to learn about hygiene. Partners of the charity work hard in villages to provide vital hygiene education on practices such as handwashing, which often require the changing of long-term behaviours in these communities.

The target figure to be raised over Lent was £180, however, the generosity of those who got involved meant that in no time, this figure had been easily surpassed. By the end of Lent, the campaign had raised an impressive £449, simply by people donating the money they were no longer spending on the luxuries that they had given up. This was a real example of how we can take a look at our own behaviours, and by making very small changes to what we do, help to make much bigger changes elsewhere.

The extra money was spent on the twinning of further items: the Sussex Green Living recycling bin, the church room fridge, the vestry tap, the vicarage toilet and the two church room toilets. The charity’s partners involve local people in deciding on the design and materials to be used in latrine building, and locals generally then build their own latrines, meaning they are much more likely to continue to use and maintain them, ensuring the project is sustainable.

The money spent on twinning the bin will help to fund community projects focusing on rubbish collection, which in turn helps to prevent disease, protect the environment and create jobs. Certificates of the twinning will be hung in the twinned toilets, showing a photograph of the overseas toilet twin and GPS coordinates so you can look up the twin’s location on Google Maps!

This initiative has clearly been a huge success and has shown how far the generosity of one community to another can go.