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