Woodlands Hospice’s Popular ‘Bring a Pound to Work Day’ has been put on hold due to the current national lockdown.
Woodlands Hospice introduced the ‘Bring a Pound to Work’ Day in February 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The event was extremely popular with many local businesses and supporters and raised over £6000 for the charity.
However, sadly, the fundraising team at the hospice have made the decision to cancel the community event for the foreseeable future, due to the current lockdown measures in place. The majority of fundraising for the day was raised from workplaces or groups organising events such as dress down Fridays in workplaces and schools, cake/coffee afternoons for a £1 donation, Swear boxes, lunch time bingos, Spot the balls and workplace raffles. Choirs and football teams met and made donations in lieu of subs.
Community Fundraising Manager, Paula Parle, who organises the event explains why they came to this decision:
‘Our Bring a Pound to Work event has always had the community spirit at it’s heart and is about bringing people together in fun ways to raise money for our services. The majority of these activities are unable to take place during the national lockdown and we felt that it would not be an appropriate time to push such an event with so many businesses and individuals feeling the pressures brought on by the Covid 19 pandemic.’
Hampson Hughes solicitors were one of the local businesses that actively supported Woodlands Hospice for their Bring a Pound to Work day, raising £110.45 for them via the event and a total of £2723.62 for the whole of 2020. They’re very sad to not be able to take part again this year, with Hampson Hughes’ Dottie Fairbrother stating:
‘Each year we put a lot of consideration into which charity our business will support, we ask our employees for their suggestions and ask they are local to our head office as we are a Liverpool based company, both company directors were born and raised in Liverpool and therefore choose to give back to the community. Woodlands Hospice has helped a number of our employees’ relatives in the past so it made clear sense to us to give back.
We had dress down days, monthly bake sales and other in house charity events prior to lock down but unfortunately these have now stopped due to our employees working from home, keeping their families safe and protecting their loved ones. We cannot wait until we are able to get back to our charity events and provide further support to our local charity.’
Whilst Woodlands Hospice may be postponing this event for now, they are still very actively fundraising and encouraging those who can to get involved. There are many ways to support the hospice virtually.
Paula Parle explained, ‘Although we felt this event wasn’t right to take online, we have loads of other ways you can still support us virtually, including challenges, online bingo events and through our online campaigns and donations. I’ve been amazed by how many people have contacted us with really imaginative and unique ideas to support us throughout 2020 and would love to hear some more for 2021! So if you have got any ideas or want to get involved, I’d love to hear from you and have a chat about what we can do.’
Paula is available to contact via 0151 529 2640 or email paula.parle@aintree.nhs.uk. For more information on Woodlands Hospice and how you can help, visit www.woodlandshospice.org