Raising Funds for local & International charities

Thanks you for your continued support for this project. It is one of the various ways we raise money for our Benevolent Fund, from which we are able to support deserving local, national and international charities.

Helped by the generosity of you, our GlobalGiving supporters, since our last report in July we have made the following donations:

• £100 to Billericay Food Bank, towards ongoing running costs. The Food Bank is currently supporting about 80 - 90 families each week. This compares to about 15 per week at the start of lockdown.

• £500 to DEC, in response to the flooding in Pakistan. This donation was doubled to £1,000 by matched funding from the government's Big Give scheme.

• £500 to ShelterBox, also in response to the Pakistan floods. ShelterBox is a charity set up by Rotary in 2000 which provides 'survival kits' in a box for families made homeless by a disaster. Each box contains a tent plus cooking equipment, supplies and tools to meet a homeless family's basic needs. Once the tent etc. has been unpacked, the box provides watertight storage.

• £500 to a project funded by us and five other Rotary Clubs that will provide 30 Biolite kits to families in Kenya who do not have access to mains electricity. Each BioLite kit consists of a small portable solar panel which charges a central control box. This provides a USB socket for charging mobile devices and an MP3/FM radio system. It also powers 3 hanging lights on 6m daisy-chain leads.

Looking ahead, I'd like to highlight our END POLIO NOW Christmas Challenge. This is a GlobalGiving microproject we have created to raise funds for Rotary's End Polio Now campaign. We're challenging people to donate £20 (or more) to this project on 29th November (Giving Tuesday) so that we can earn a share of the $1.2m bonus fund which GlobalGiving is distributing proportionately across all donations made on that day. We ran a similar microproject last year and each donation earned a bonus of about 30%, resulting in a donation of over £2,200 to End Polio Now, so we'd be delighted if you would put 29th November in your diary and make a donation on the day by following the link below.

Thank you once again for your continued support and we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Links:

• END POLIO NOW Christmas Challenge 2022

This GlobalGiving project is one of the various ways we raise money for our Benevolent Fund, from which we are able to support deserving local, national and international charities.

Helped by the generosity of you, our GlobalGiving supporters, since our last report in March we have made the following donations:

• £200 to Barrow Farm Riding for the Disabled, a charity we support on a regular basis. This supported their summer ‘Driving Holiday’, enabling 6 disabled carriage drivers to experience driving at Ashfields Carriage Driving Centre which included lessons with Minta Winn, an international carriage driver.
• £1,000 to Billericay Food bank, towards purchase of a van to collect and distribute food donations. Previously the food bank had to make do with use of a minibus which was less than ideal for their purposes.
• £100 to Lennox Children’s Cancer Fund, a local charity we support annually, which provides practical, financial and emotional support to the families of children living with cancer.
• £230 to provide a day out at Old Macdonald’s Farm activity centre for children with behavioural difficulties from Ramsden Hall Academy, as part of Rotary’s ‘Kids Out’ programme. Several club members participated in this event, supporting the staff who were responsible for the children.
• £100 to Friends of Lake Meadows towards the costs of their annual photographic competition. This is an annual event open to the whole community, adults and children, and we provide this sponsorship each year.
• £200 to St Luke’s Hospice, another charity we support regularly, in response to their ‘Nurses Day’ appeal.
• £1,580 to Rotary’s own charity, the Rotary Foundation. This donation is funded entirely by donations from club members, each of whom commits to give at least $100 each year to the Rotary Foundation. Clubs can seek grants from the Rotary Foundation to help fund major projects and we were awarded £5,750 towards our Borewells project from this source.

 Thank you for continuing to support this project.