Put a Penny On

PennyOn is a simple solution to ensuring every person in the world has what they need – enough to eat, a safe place to sleep, education and their health. It starts with you giving one penny. You can do this every time you shop. Participating retailers will add a penny to your bill; or you can calculate how often you shop and send the money to PennyOn using PayPal.

There’s about £580 million in loose change just lying around – you can turn that into something positive. If you find some of that, you can donate it.

You can also collect all your spare change each night by emptying your pockets or purse – and donate all the pennies to PennyOn, and do something creative with the rest of the money.

Your pennies can be used to help people take care of themselves – from support programmes in your local community to get people back on their feet and overseas educational projects to help people grow their own food so they can feed themselves or building their own schools so they can teach their community the skills they need to thrive. PennyOn will be supporting some worthwhile projects. Contact them for more information: www.pennyon.com

Socks for Happy People is a new social venture. This is how they describe themselves: The happy surprise with which people say ‘socks?’ when they hear what we do is always fun to see. It seems starting a sock company, in itself, is a little bit different since great socks - despite being over 3,000 years old - have somehow remained below most people’s radars.

Well we think it's time for that to change. Socks are brilliant and they deserve to be celebrated! But socks - brilliant as they are - aren't really the reason we're here. Socks for Happy People exists for reasons much deeper than socks. In fact sometimes we say, in the nicest possible way: "If you think we're in the sock business you've already missed the point." But also:

• Socks can literally help brighten your day
• Others can enjoy your socks as well as you
• Everything can be improved
• Socks could be the first step into something greater

Their proportional stripe sock is in colourful stripes (in four colourways) with the width of each stripe proportional to where the £65 million of lost pennies are estimated to be:

• Down the backs of sofas, £5.9 million
• In the supermarket, £2.6 million
• Inside vacuum cleaners, £1.3 million
• In washing machines, £3.3 million
• In the car, £7.8 million
• Down the drain £0.65 million
• On public transport, £2 million
• In clothes and shoes, £3.9 million
• On the street, £26 million
• In handbags and suitcases, £11 million

For every pair of socks you purchase, you will also be donating a pair to a streetchild in Mongolia, and you have the option of putting a Penny On. www.socksforhappypeople.com