That name, Stichting Kinderpostzegels Nederland, isn’t it a bit old-fashioned? “That was exactly the question I asked last year during my application procedure!” says Sofie Vriends on the phone, while she catches her breath in the cubicle of the internal supervisor of the St. Joseph School Leiden. As director of the foundation, she has just launched the new children’s stamp there, always on the last Wednesday of September, and because the stamp has been around for 100 years, Princess Margriet, the mayor, children from groups 7 and 8 and a bunch of press were also there. Vriends still has to go to Hilversum, Time for Max.
Stamps? Who still sticks stamps on? But when she asked about it in her application, it turned out that the foundation had just conducted a large public survey in which they had also asked about a possible name change. The answer was overwhelming: don’t change it! “It showed that the public has a strong positive association with the name, and that it’s not about the stamp but about the campaign.” So that name, Vriends thinks, will remain, “even if we were to stop selling stamps altogether.”
Princess Beatrix (left) in 1948 and the sale of children’s stamps in the post office bus in 1948.
Photos Children’s Stamps Foundation
Although the Dutch Children’s Stamps Foundation has certainly moved with the times over the past hundred years.
When in 1924 the Dutch government, following the example of Switzerland, introduced a special stamp with a surcharge for ‘the deprived child’, because of all the orphans after the Spanish flu, it was still the adult volunteers who went door to door. A schoolmaster G. Verheul from Waarder saw it in 1948 as an educational opportunity to have his school class go door to door and a tradition was born.
Since then, thousands of school children have been going door to door throughout the Netherlands for a week to sell a sheet of children’s stamps for charity. In 1956, more than half of all primary schools participated. In 1992, after a number of robberies, the collection of cash stopped and the payment slip was introduced. In recent years, payment has been made via a QR code on an order form, which can be scanned with a smartphone and paid for in the webshop via iDeal.
The goals that Stichting Kinderpostzegels Nederland supports are projects such as ‘Believing in Yourself’ and support for children in asylum seekers’ centres and foster care. The foundation helped establish the Children’s Telephone in 1979 and the Children’s Ombudsman in 2011, and since the late sixties it has also supported projects abroad. A school library, planting trees in a schoolyard to protect against the bright sun. Previously in about forty countries, now only in West Africa, India and the Caribbean part of the Netherlands. Vriends: “We only want to participate in projects with which we can really change something.”
And over the years, fewer and fewer people stuck on a stamp.
‘Stamp disappears’ has consistently been listed as the biggest ‘threat’ in the annual reports of the last ten years. To counteract the problem, children have also been selling cards and a tin of children’s plasters since 2012. The range was then expanded with a ‘hip shopper’, ‘colourful tulip bulbs’, ‘anemones’ and a ‘tea package’, although the latter three products were ‘not a success’ according to Vriends. No problem, because it now appears that people are also willing to donate at the door without getting anything in return, simply with a QR code. And so the annual donations – always around 9 million euros – have remained virtually stable over the years.
The sale of children’s stamps in 1987 and in 1991 to Prime Minister Lubbers.
Photos Children’s Stamps Foundation, Ed Oudenaarden
Another threat: the decreasing number of primary schools participating in the campaign. In 2016, around 160,000 children went door-to-door, last year that number was 120,000. Particularly in urban areas, the enthusiasm among schools is waning, Vriends sees. “Teachers indicate that they are busy and in large cities the teacher shortage also plays a role.”
The children’s enthusiasm has not changed over the years. For example, Vriends saw children at the school in Leiden “bouncing” through the corridors again because they will soon be allowed to walk along the doors. And the competitive spirit among themselves has not changed either. Because even though teachers no longer keep track of which children sold best on the blackboard, “no longer of this time”, they know exactly among themselves.
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