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Our Spring Charity Partnership

Posted on by Angeline Westley

Our charity champions, Anna and Jess made their way over to visit our charity of the year Acorns Children’s Hospice, to brainstorm fundraising ideas.

 

This year, Acorns are celebrating a huge milestone; their 30th anniversary. Part of their fundraising challenge is to encourage supporters to have a go at any or a selection of their ‘30 things to do’ list. Any of these actions will allow you to support life limited and life threatened children and their families.

That’s why our board short-listed them and our staff voted for them as our partner because we wanted the opportunity to help this phenomenal cause. The wonderful staff of Acorns showed our champions around. Here’s what they had to say about it:

“A few weeks ago we set off to visit the team at Acorns Children’s Hospice to get our heads together and see how we can help. They showed us around the grounds, giving us a tour of their hydrotherapy pool, their memorial garden, art and crafts areas and so much more. Along the way, we met with a young person we used to support. They recognised Jess and smiled which was heart-warming to see.

When discussing goals with the team, they mentioned they wanted to have a real collective drive towards hitting their funding target. They aim to build a new swimming pool for the children and their families and purchase better equipment so that the children’s needs are being met more efficiently.”

To kick off our fundraising, on Thursday 29th March we hosted our Progress Spring Day. This fun day consisted of a hunt the bunny activity, a bake sale and luxury Easter egg raffle. Well done to all our winners: Nicola (from the Hub) on winning the raffle and Louise, Jo, and one of our children’s parents in ‘hunt the bunny.’ The egg and spoon race certainly entertained. Well done Michelle and Phil (we won’t mention that your win was after your opponent fell over!)

All in all, we had a successful day and we are grateful to all staff for getting involved and in total, we raised almost £70. To keep the good work going, we’d welcome any suggestions for our next fundraising event. If you have something in mind, please do get in touch via fundraising@progresscare.co.uk.

Introducing Acorns Children’s Hospice Trust

Posted on by Angeline Westley

In our last update, we shared with you our mission to choose a charity to focus our fundraising efforts on. We are pleased to announce that our chosen charity is Acorn Children’s Hospice Trust.

Based across three locations in the Midlands – Selly Oak, Worcester, and Walsall – our chosen charity offer an incredible support network of care for life limited and life threatened babies, children, and young people and their families.

In the last year, they supported 876 children and 1,097 families by providing tailored nursing care; such as short breaks, emergency and end of life care at their hospices. The children and young people they look after are not expected to reach adulthood and require constant specialist care 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We have been absolutely blown away with the level of care Acorn provide, and their holistic approach to ensure that they meet the needs of both the children and young people in their care, as well as their families; an approach that we recognise well.

We certainly felt Acorn Children’s Hospice Trusts’ values aligned well with our own, and thus we made them our chosen charity partner. We mentioned in our last blog that between our staff members we would elect two charity champions that will lead the fundraising. They will be in charge of picking the activities that both our staff and young people can get involved with to fundraise. Between them, they will coordinate the events, be in charge of the money collection, and of course report back so that we can keep you updated of the fantastic events and what the money raised can help achieve.

In our next instalment, we will introduce our two chosen charity champions and find out a little bit more about the exciting plans they have in store for fundraising events. Stay tuned!

New for 2018- Our Charity Activities

Posted on by Angeline Westley

The philosophy coined by Confucius over 2,500 years ago, is still incredibly relevant today. Over the last 25 centuries opportunities have become unlimited, and decisions endless. We’ve found this to dramatically be the case when it comes to fundraising and giving back to local charities. With so many incredible causes doing fantastic work, historically we have found it a challenge to zero in on a single initiative. As a result, we have given a lot of funds to many different formidable causes, but by spreading our resources so thin, we haven’t felt that we have been able to make much of an impact as we’d like to.

 

We want to change that. We have determined that focus is the key to fine-tuning our existing process. Instead of giving to lots of different causes and making very little difference, we have decided to split our fund pot down the middle. One half will go to a charity of our choosing, and the other will be kept for projects we feel would benefit from a top up. The charity of our choosing will be one that resonates with our core values, beliefs, and aligns with our business. The remaining pot will be a flexible fund that can still be used a number of different ways. Perhaps one of the local kid’s football teams need shirt sponsors or donating annual funds that we support such as ‘The Magic of Milly Ball.’ One of the recent projects that our owners Bal and Raj have started is collecting new socks for homeless young people. This is just one example of the seemingly small but hugely beneficial projects this capital can fund.

 

We are currently in the process of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on our chosen charity, and picking our charity champions: the two individuals responsible for the fundraising activities. Stay tuned for further updates!