When we officially started Chicken Fruit in 2019, it was a bittersweet moment. Yes, there was the high of formally incorporating the stuff we’d been doing, but also, we were well aware that having a company made us Business Owners (capital letters required). This meant that we were, at least a little bit, soulless capitalist scumbags. Being a soulless capitalist scumbag is obviously not ideal. Soulless? Sure, especially before 9am. Scumbags? 100%. But capitalist?? That one hurt.
So, we made an unofficial pledge to ourselves: to put a smidge of good back into the world, we’d try to do every tenth project for free, for a good cause.
We mentioned this briefly before, in our blog post about litter-picking. Eagle-eyed Chicken Fruit super-fans may have noticed that we haven’t mentioned it since, and might have assumed that meant we had abandoned the pledge and have descended into exploiting employees and hoarding money, like all good soulless capitalist scumbags should. But we’re pleased to announce that isn’t actually the case! We have done some good things, we swear! And now, to completely negate it, here’s a blog post bragging about it.
Work with local charities
Although we told ourselves that our litter picking adventures totally counted, it was also something we did for a few hours on a Saturday. Yes, technically, it was an all-staff Chicken Fruit volunteering day, but on the other hand, it was also just Jonny and Lindsey nipping down to a local reservoir to help out for a bit on a weekend.
However, like the good networkers we are desperately trying to be, we managed to drop the “we have an animation studio!” bomb while we were there, and the good people at the Friends of the Welsh Harp group got in touch with us a few months later.
They had a few projects that had been pending for a while, and we offered to help them out. The first was a logo design – above shows a few of the options we presented. Please note that the white shape through the green circle/heart is the shape of the Welsh Harp reservoir itself, and not some kind of warped tufty-haired hummingbird.
Along with the logo, the Friends of the Welsh Harp were also looking to erect some posters in the duck-feeding hotspots around the reservoir. Official sources say that, while a small amount of bread is fine for ducks to eat, lots of bread can be harmful to the birds and to the environment. Therefore, when you visit your soggy feathered friends, it’s preferable to feed them other things, such as oats, lettuce, peas, corn, rice or bird seeds.
Through our work with the Friends of the Welsh Harp, we also got in touch with another local group: the Barnet Community Harvesters, who work to harvest surplus fruit and veg from local parks, private gardens and allotments, and distribute it to community causes.
The BCH were also in need of a logo – they wanted something a little more informal and fun than the Welsh Harpies.
High on our local community success, we also worked with the Community Harvesters on a few flyers and other local advertising – and also took advantage of their unparalleled knowledge of publicly accessible fruit trees in the area. 👀
Work with national charities
We have talked before about our work with Greenpeace UK on their online videos. For the most part, this has been standard paid work (although at our discounted charity rate), so it’s actually the exact opposite of donating things to charity. However, when we can, we do like to throw a little extra somethin-somethin into our Greenpeace work, so our consciences are eased and also so the kind folk at Greenpeace think we’re very cool and generous.
One such freebie was a giant 3D elephant seal. Who wouldn’t want a free one of those?
We’ve also done some spec work for The Big Issue. Because it was spec work, this one was completely unpaid. Thank goodness.
Donations
As a small studio, time is our most precious resource, so sometimes we have no choice but to offer charities a much more boring (but arguably much more helpful) donation: money. Every year, we pick one or more charities to support financially.
In 2019, it was the White Lily Ball, which is an event near Jonny’s home village of Holme on Spalding Moor that supports families affected by cancer.
In 2020, we supported three charities: The Trussell Trust, Create and the Creative Youth Network.
The Trussell Trust supports a UK-wide network of food banks for those in need. This is obviously important every year, but was even more so last year during the uncertainty of the start of the pandemic, and the sudden change in a lot of people’s financial positions.
Both Create and the Creative Youth Network support people from disadvantaged backgrounds to reach their potential through creativity. In the wake of the pandemic and yet more budget cuts for the arts from the Tory government, it felt important to lend our voice (and our £) to charities who understand the importance of creativity as a tool for mental health, personal growth, and changing lives.
As a studio, we’re still a long way off being able to change the world with every animation we do. But, until we get there, we’re doing our best to do what we can to make a difference. (And then blogging about it. God, we’re awful.)
