Charity Update
The last charity update I published was on the 11th of November. I thought I would post another little update now to let you all know how our fundraising efforts are going.
If you don’t already know, Twin Daddy and I are trying to raise £2,000 for Cancer Research UK and another £2,000 for Bliss, the baby charity.
Both charities are very close to our hearts. In 2005, after a brave and long battle with ovarian cancer my mum passed away.
In 2012 our beautiful twin daughters were born six weeks early and spent 27 days in neonatal care.
For the above reasons we have decided that we want to help raise as much money as we can.
In 2014 we will be skydiving in aid of both of these amazing charities. This means we have arranged a number of different events to help us meet our fundraising targets.
The first event was our charity raffle, which ended yesterday. We had a number of wonderful prizes up for grabs and the winners will be picked soon.
At the time of writing our last update we had raised £203 for Cancer Research UK and £226 for Bliss. A total of £429.00.
I’m pleased to let you know that our second charity event was a children’s Christmas party. This was held on Saturday, 21st December in our local church hall.
When we started thinking about all of the different events we wanted to do to raise money, I knew that I wanted to organise a children’s Christmas party, but obviously as it’s for charity I didn’t want to spend an awful lot of money.
The first thing we needed to think about was the venue. I wanted to get this for free. Our original venue was our local recreation club who were willing to give us the room for free, but they didn’t allow food from outside to be brought in. This meant they would be charging £3.50 a head for food.
This wasn’t great news as it meant my original idea of selling tickets for £3.00 each had to be increased to £6.50 each and for a children’s Christmas party I think you’ll agree that is a lot of money!
The recreation club then told us we weren’t allowed a bouncy castle due to health and safety.
Oh no! I thought my dream of hosting a children’s Christmas party would never happen now!
Thankfully the church where our local play group is held were more accommodating!
They gave us the room for free, they were happy for us to have a bouncy castle and they wouldn’t charge us for bringing our own food in!
Yay! So that was the venue sorted!
Next up we needed to organise some entertainment for the children.
After making a few phone calls we managed to get a fantastic company to lend us their bouncy castle completely free of charge! That company is Carls Castles and if you live in or around the Cardiff area I can highly recommend them!
Next up and our wonderful friend, Pip, lent us her music system which meant we could play Christmas music.
We decided to make the buffet food ourselves to save money and we managed to buy all the food for around £15!
I also bought a mixture of party bag type toys so we could have a lucky dip and we charged 50p a go.
Last, but not least, a Christmas party wouldn’t be a Christmas party without Santa. After advertising online we found someone who was willing to help for £20.00! This was our biggest outlay, but I didn’t mind paying as we couldn’t find anyone willing to do this for free.
All of this meant that our children’s Christmas party cost us a grand total of £35!
Now for the good news…
We managed to raise a total of £184!
This means on top of the money we have raised through our fundraising pages already, which now stands at £268 for Cancer Research UK and £238 for Bliss, the baby charity we have raised a total of £690!
I’m so pleased and proud of how much we have raised so far!
Everyone had a great time at the party and it was a great way to get into the Christmas spirit and also raise money for two great charities.
Our fundraising pages are still open. If you’d like to help us reach our target, please click here to donate to Cancer Research UK or click here to donate to Bliss.
We hope you all have a great Christmas and we’ll be back in the new year with some more fundraising events!
