Tuesday, April 17, 2012

The Ease of Donation

I set up a page with Virgin Money Giving today for the Three Peaks Challenge, so hopefully that will make it a little easier for people to get in touch and donate!
 Josie Virgin Money Giving - Project Trust

The sponsorship forms for that also went out today and so far I have got one sponsor for £50!! What a generous teacher is all I can say!

The whole writing letters to charitable trusts thing is taking a little longer than I thought it might, because I feel I have to write an individual letter to every charity to make it more specific to the causes that they donate to. Hence, I have so far written 20 different letters and will hopefully get them sent tomorrow. :-) I'll try to make that a weekly occurrence, as I found out that one of the girls who was on my selection course has already raised almost £1200 from charitable donations, just from routine, bulk letter sending.

So tomorrow...it's to the Post Office for me!

Sunday, April 15, 2012

The Fundraising Has To Start Somewhere!

So I was selected to go abroad with the Project Trust Charity on the 15th March 2012. I had attended the selection course on the Isle of Coll in the Outer Hebrides in February, but had fallen ill, and had to be airlifted over to the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley! Project Trust later interviewed me and soon enough I received a letter saying that I had been selected to go to Malaysia with the charity (having also been pooled for Indonesia and India).
So, from then until now, and until the day I go, the focus is on raising a grand total of  £4600!

I set to work straight away by organising weekly cake sales at my college, and so far, after just 2 cakes sales, I have raised £78.86. Not much respectively, but a step towards the total, and definitely a start to the fund!

I have also set about referencing 'The Directory of Grant Making Trusts' which unfortunately cannot be found in my local library, so I have to go to Stockport to look at it! However it's a small sacrifice in the grand scheme of things. The idea is that from this week onwards, now that the holidays are over and I have full access to the college printers again, I'm going to send out 20 letters to trusts every week, so i'm going to have to stock up on plenty of envelopes and stamps!

I have got two main events so far, that hopefully will bring in a fair amount of funds. The first one is a Charity Concert that I have managed to organise at my old secondary school; they were very kind and said I could. :-) For anyone who's interested, it's at St Thomas More Secondary School, Buxton, Friday 22nd June, 7.30pm. Raffle and refreshments included! Tickets will be £5 (£3.50 for children and seniors), and my good friend Alyss has been so kind as to volunteer to design the leaflets, programmes and tickets for me. Which is fantastic as I'm useless with computer art!
The next main event is the sponsored 'Three Peaks Challenge' where myself and a couple of other friends will be walking up Snowdon, Scafell Pike and Ben Nevis in 24 hours. A tough challenge and I think we all need to get training!

At the beginning of April I wrote a letter to Morrisons and asked if I could book a bag packing date. Unfortunately I received a letter back saying that from now until August they were completely booked up. I think I'll move on to Tesco...

It's a start. There's still plenty more that needs doing and setting up and I will be keeping a running blog of what's going on and how the fundraising is going! :-) Until next time...

Josie