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Dan Charlish on
at a fund rais
Snow-
DAN CHARLISH
can still vividly remember the
moment that his life changed. He was running a
local community project in London, when one day
noticed some of the kids playing snowboarding ga
on the PlayStation.
“They were talking about how much they wante
try it for real and how out of reach it was,” recalls t
37-year-old. It was then the brainwave struck: wha
he could actually make it happen?
“We decided there and then to launch a charity,”
he recalls. The idea was simple: to give disadvanta
children the opportunity to learn how to ski and,
potentially, even become instructors. To get things
off the ground, Charlish roped in some friends to a
as volunteers and things quickly, well, snowballed.
“I asked one mate to run the website, got some mor
experienced youth workers to be involved and got a
finance person to help out,” he says.
It wasn’t long before he was making his way to
France with a bunch of kids who had never really s
proper snow before, let alone actually carved up a
piste. “For our first trip, we took a small group out t
the resort of Les Deux Alpes in France,” he says. “
ran it on a shoestring, but straight away we could s
the potential. Soon after we got back, we were give
a £7,000 grant from UnLtd, the National Lottery’
social entrepreneur arm, and were able to establish
ourselves properly.”
That was in 2003. Today, Charlish’s Snow-Cam
charity has one part-time and three full-time
members of staff, and is in the process of recruiting
full-time fundraising co-ordinator. More importan
they also work with 400 disadvantaged kids a year.
For every one of them, the experience is life changi
“We develop their snow-sports skills, while
also looking at vocational opportunities in the ski
industry, and giving them talks from seasonaires
and instructors. We try and open up this world and
let them see it isn’t as closed to them as they might
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