Morbid Make It Happen Foundation

From the Make It Happen Foundation's YouTube channel: "We try to take as many children as possible each year on fun filled excursions and the sad part is some of these children don't make easter [sic] of the following year"

Given that the organisation has existed for less than a year I find this rather disturbing.

Make It Happen Foundation and the Case of the Disappearing Hospitals

I've spoken of the Make It Happen Foundation before. Ostensibly a charity it was noted by its absence from the Revenue's list of approved charities. It seems key members of staff also worked on a previous venture which lost Revenue approval and was wound up for failing to pay suppliers. The sparse text on their website appears to contain content copied from the Make A Wish Foundation, a recognised, worthy charity.

Their front page advertises "Hospitals Associated with the MIHF":

A morbid sense of curiosity led me to click the link which delivered me to the following establishments. Click for a larger image:

You'll note "Bernardos", a misspelling of Barnardos, Ireland's leading children's charity. The entry is completed by the Dublin address of their teenage support programme and the Limerick phone number of their family support service. The prefix is incorrect.

Immediately below we find the Children's Sunshine Home. They also operate as the Laura Lynn house and are Ireland's first and only children's hospice.

I do quite enjoy programming as a method of finding information, but just occasionally it can be simpler to ask the question.

Spot The Difference

The Make A Wish Foundation in Ireland helped Joshua be a pirate for the day. He won a cutlass fight with the real John Sparrow. With their help, Erin trained as a knight and stormed a castle to rescue a dog. They've helped seriously ill kids meet Metallica, Ronaldo and Barney. It's hard to read their stories without moist eyes.

In an earlier episode I wrote some notes on a rather different group, the Make It Happen Foundation. A self described charity, the organisation is not on the Revenue's list of approved charities. The director and other members are refugees from Children To Lapland Appeal, an organisation stricken from the list of approved charities and wound up for failing to pay its suppliers.

Some of these munificent members hail from the same original travel agency, bereft of aviation licence for reasons perhaps too lengthy to recap. They earn their crusts by encouraging volunteers to take sponsored holidays. Funds raised are devoted to buying holidays for children, their families and their parents. If the conflict of interest in this rather inefficient model is not apparent I encourage you to read the earlier post.

A new member unconnected with previous enterprises has come to my attention: their marketing development executive, Brian Ó Súileabháin. I'll be spelling his name in Irish - I don't think errors made in the early stages of one's career should be the first thing Google returns, but you can see the English spelling above. Judging by the common spelling mistakes, retweets and times spent online he also controls their Twitter account. He received a rather irate tweet from Bath Marketing:

When Is A Charity Not A Charity?

I've been considering using my powers more positively. I certainly don't regret exposing oddities through Twitter metrics and will likely continue to do so. But it would be nice to also build up as well as tearing down.

With that in mind I was happy to be followed by @MIHFIreland, a group who describe themselves as "a new Irish Charity set up with the sole intention of helping children Nationwide with serious illness [sic] & disabilities."

Broken link, inconsistent capitalisation and grammar aside, it seemed a worthy endeavour. I saw they had only 266 followers - perhaps if I ran some Twitter metrics I could help them get a wider reach?

With that in mind I started research. Their main focus seems to be taking children on a two day visit to Santa in Lapland for the princely sum of €999 per adult and €899 per child. Plus €150 registration, naturally. To fund these trips they encourage charitable-minded folk to raise €2,750 per person to take a holiday in the Philippines. Personally, if I sponsor someone, I expect them to suffer.

Curious to find out more I checked the Revenue's list of authorised charities for the Make It Happen Foundation and found them absent. My eyebrow raised in surprise I checked to see if their address was listed: perhaps they had changed names recently. No joy.