Month: October 2017

A team of National Lottery winners will be handing over the keys of a giant Gingerbread playhouse to a hospice in Middlesbrough to mark this year’s #givingtuesday.

With a combined wealth of over £25 million, the lottery winners will be giving Santa and his elves a run for their money, when they turn a simple wood cabin into a magical super-sized gingerbread playhouse for the charity.

Zoe’s Place Baby Hospice provides incredible palliative, respite and end-of-life care to very young children aged from birth to five years suffering from life-limiting or life-threatening conditions. Designed to be a ‘home away from home’, the hospice ensures families have the opportunity to spend valuable time with their other children or have the chance to catch up on much needed sleep.

The lottery winners from across the region will have to work tirelessly over 24 hours to create the Gingerbread house and transform it into a winter wonderland, filling it with gifts and toys for the hospice and young visitors to enjoy. They will be using more than 100 litres of paint, 60 paintbrushes, 30 rollers, 40 bespoke wooden shapes, 6 sacks of fake snow and 25 metres of twinkly lights, to finish the cabin for the Zoe’s Place team.

And the very next day (29th November 2017), the new Gingerbread House will be used as Santa’s grotto when the Hospice officially turns on its Christmas lights for staff, families and supporters to enjoy.

Mark Guidery, General Manager at Zoe’s Place said:

“We are absolutely over-joyed that lottery winners have chosen to come to us and spend their time creating something so wonderful.

“We could never have dreamed of owning something like this. It is absolutely fantastic and will bring hours of joy to so many children, including the siblings of our poorly children. We genuinely cannot thank everyone enough for their kindness, time and generosity”

Anya Reynolds from The National Lottery team said: “Zoe’s Place has a magical feel about it and the staff are incredible. We are delighted to be able to create such a colourful gingerbread playhouse which will hopefully bring lots of joy to the young people here, their siblings and their families. We can’t wait to get stuck in!”

#givingtuesday is an international campaign led in the UK by the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF). It encourages people to ‘do good stuff’ for causes they care about following the shopping frenzy of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. More than 1,600 organisations including major charities and businesses are signed up to take part.

Recently, our wonderful #givingtuesday partners GOOD Agency hosted 30 or so people at their offices for a special workshop – to discuss how to make #givingtuesday 2017 a brilliant success.

According to GOOD Agency’s creative director Reuben Turner the day is an opportunity for charities to raise money and for businesses to engage staff and customers in CSR and social purpose initiatives. But that’s not all. What if we approached the day slightly differently and instead of thinking about how we can get partners, volunteers and fundraisers to give to charity again, thought about what we could do for our supporters?

To help explore that thinking a bit more the team at GOOD Agency have produced a brand new resource for charity partners: ‘#givingtuesday, a chance to give back‘

The brand new resource offers ten ideas for things your organisation could do on #givingtuesday and has a whole host of examples of how they’ve worked for others. Take a look and consider whether you want to use #givingtuesday to give back this year.

And you can read more of Reuben’s thoughts on #givingtuesday by visiting the GOOD Agency’s blog here.