Hi my name is Lauren and I have started a friendship club for the older people in my village and local area. Its an attempt to get some of them out, provide a support network in case they are ever ill, need help, go into hospital, at the club we want to provide a hot meal as well as refreshments.. A big thank you to our local pub for lending us their back room for free and providing the food at cost. A big thank you to a local man for donating £500 to get us started, incerdibly generous. This will certainly pay for some hot dinners!
I have put together a calendar of 'times gone by' of Eight Ash Green, Colchester for £10 if anyone wants to buy one. All proceeds go to funding the club.
We need equipment, arts & craft materials, a bingo machine, 10 laptops, stationary and a mini bus and that's just for starters lol
To become a registered charity we need to raise £5,000 - donations gladly accepted lol. So far I have raised £700. My goal is to raise enough funds to buy a mini bus and that really is just for starters.
Part of the project is to protect the old folk from being scammed so a magazine is in the
pipeline and planned to launch in December 2015 - we're looking for support from local business to advertise and to run a short piece about themselves which will become part of our stay safe with business campaign. The magazine is set for an initial run of 2500 copies to be delivered to locally in Eight Ash Green & Fordham. People are more comfortable buying products & services from people they know. We want local businesses to become more friendly & we hope this will inspire trust from the local people to buy local.
We are doing all this because older people are vulnerable. With more and more older people staying at home and their families busier than ever and money being tight for some families, older people suffer, they become lonely, suffer from depression and in many cases don't eat properly.
We are all going to get old and if nothing is done, there is nothing to look forward to.
i will gladly accept any offers of help, advice, ideas in general and for fundraising and of course donations! Maybe even a couple of businesses could sponsor us? In return we will put your logo in our monthly newlsetters, website, twitter etc. .
The council currently run a Monday Shopper bus for our older people to get to Sainsburys & back - it is a door to door pickup. They plan to scrap this to save funds. The bus is well used and always full. So, I want our village to get it's own minibus. I have a big target on my hands but with as many people helping as possible it will lighten the load!
If Children in Need can raise millions in one night, we surely can raise at least £30,000 for a new, adapted mini bus.
Thanks for reading & I hope I will learn alot from here, to help me increase the awareness of my cause and I hope in turn we can help support local business
If you know someone in your area who may benefit from joining in, be sure to let them know about us as well.
