Hello friends, 

Thanks for visiting my trek fundraising page! 

In June, along with 4 friends, I'm walking 50km in a day as part of the Lake District Challenge to raise money for Central London Samaritans.

I'm very lucky to have volunteered at Samaritans for around 8 years now which has given me lots of opportunity to see how much the charity can help people, and how important this branch is to the London community.

Our branch is run completely on fundraising - we don't get any money from the central Samaritans charity and everyone providing support is a volunteer. We (famously) answer the phones, but we also provide an email service, webchat, listen face-to-face, do outreach in prisons and at other places around London - and we couldn't do any of it without donations! 

Some fun stats:

Each year CLS' approx. 400 volunteers:

• donate 80,000 hours to run our charity – equivalent to 44 full time staff – which ensures we remain open to callers 24 hours a day, every day of the year;
• respond to over 70,000 calls for help via phone, email and webchat;
• support up to 4,000 callers face-to-face via our branch drop-in service;
• help over 2,000 of London’s most vulnerable people including those who are homeless, those bereaved by suicide, prisoners and people in custody;
• raise awareness with young people through our schools and university outreach programme reaching up to 4,000 pupils and students;
• raise awareness with the wider community through our work with other charities, corporates and other organisations reaching over 1,000 people.
  

The money you give goes straight to keeping our lovely branch open -  covering the costs of maintaining the building, the IT and phone system, and providing the other resources we need to keep supporting people.

It costs around £400,000 a year to run our branch! So please sponsor me today to help make what will undoubtedly be a blister-filled walk worthwhile. 

Emily xxx