Here we go! The first blog of 2023 and this is going to be a BIG YEAR! I sort of had a bit of a run in at setting myself a target to raise money for sick children last year by spending about 10 months gathering 30 companies to each raise £3500k for Pied Piper to try to add an extra £100k on to what we normally raise. I started to sign them up in February/March in 2021 so that they couldn’t say they already had a charity for 2022, which was our 30th year because it was too early in the year! and it worked quite well. Having said that – I probably contacted about 80 businesses to get 30 & some of them got much busier as we came out of the ‘Covid’ lifestyle and didn’t have the time they thought they would have to focus on it.
But
It worked and we did raise an extra £100k. A good warm up for raising £500k in one year!….Yes you read it correctly – £500k who is laughing??!!
Yes…I am going to raise half a million pounds….does that make it sound easier or more difficult? in one year.
For What?
Well, if you don’t know me at all. I will try and make this as short as possible. My husband and I lost our first and only child at the time, to a brain tumour when our daughter Emily was 3 years old. We discovered it when she was 2 and a half because she kept falling over and the child minder said she didn’t like walking to school to collect the other children and dragged her feet or was a little unstable at times. I took her for an eye test and the optician advised an appointment with an eye specialist at the hospital. He then suggested a scan and when we eventually got a scan on December 8th 1994 we were taken from the waiting room at Gloucester hospital straight to Frenchay in an ambulance as she had a large tumour in the back of her brain.
That is when your world turns upside down. Tumour – we hadn’t had anyone in our family with a tumour and I really didn’t know what it was. Cancer? weren’t children excluded from such a dreadful thing?
After 6 months of treatment at Bristol Children’s Hospital & Glos Royal Hospital Emily died on June 15th 1995.
As is quite common when people lose a child I think, we started a charity in her name to raise money firstly for anaesthetic equipment for the BRI & then for children with cancer in Gloucestershire. We had two wards named after her, one in Bristol and one in Gloucester which is still called the Emily Kent Unit (EKU) – that is where the £500k will be spent.
I don’t want to do a complete spoiler on the launch of Emily’s Gift on March 10th, which would have been her 31st Birthday so lets say that this is episode one of this 2023 blog.
This last week has been draining and emotional. With about 8 and a half weeks to go before the launch things are hotting up. I have been planning and thinking about what I was going to do as my final flurry of fundraising in Emily’s name for a couple of years. Ideally, I would have done it this year as it would have been her 30th year but as Pied Piper didn’t have a paid fundraiser on the staff I took on the role as a volunteer. So it will be this year and it will run for one year from March 10th 2023 to 2024.
It sounds scary! £500,000 – there – with the noughts on – looks even more scary but is only 250 businesses giving me £2000 and some might give a bit more. As I am typing, there are 38 lovely businesses having pledged £2k already. Wouldn’t it be great to have £100k in the bag at the launch?
This week we had two lovely little boys in the middle of their 3 years of treatment for leukaemia and their parents come to the EKU to speak about their experience of living with cancer for our film. I was a blubbering wreck all the way into the hospital in the car but kept it together once we got going. Those families are the brave ones now. Coping with treatment, illness, temperatures, trying to live as a normal family doing normal things but you can’t be normal if your child has a line in their chest and catching an infection could be extremely dangerous.
They are brave and I need to help them as much as I can. I need to make a big positive from my big negative. Anyone want to help and pledge anything from £10 to £10,000?? message me on some platform – I am easy to find!
email – emilysgift@piedpiperappeal.co.uk
