Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.

Through St Marys participation in this Bike N Hike we will be using our share of our proceeds raised to support the following organisations:

Young Minds -  which is a charity that supports young people ; this is part of their mission statement

‘The sheer scale of
the problem we’re faced with can feel overwhelming. More young people than ever
before need support for their mental health and accessing that support quickly,
can make a critical difference to those young people. Yet, most of the time
those young people need to wait. And wait. And wait.

When it feels like
nothing is there for you when you need it most, you feel alone. For far too
many young people, this is their reality. When they need help and can’t get it,
it feels like they’re being told they don’t matter.

We have called our
strategy ‘You Matter’ because, ultimately, that is what this is all about. We
need young people to know that whatever they are going through, they matter and
they deserve help. And each and every one of us needs to acknowledge that, to
those young people, we matter and the role we can play is vital.’

Harpenden Spot Light On Africa 
Locally based organisation supporting communities in Mbale region in Uganda – they are raising funds for Covid-19 Emergency Appeal in Uganda – below is an extract from their appeals page

Covid-19 Emergency
Appeal: for Orphans & Vulnerable Children Uganda enters a second lockdown The Uganda Medical Association reports week-on-week increases in new Covid-19 cases and the WHO warns of a third wave pandemic across Africa where vaccination rates are lower than 10%. This is a real emergency situation and has led to a sudden lockdown of Uganda for a second time. It will have a devastating impact on the community that Spotlight on Africa serves, especially orphans and vulnerable children like Moses.

Moses' Story

Moses lost both his parents when he was young. He has been brought up by his grandmother who earns a living selling banana leaves in the market, which local people use to wrap
food in. It's a very low source of income and certainly not enough to provide food for both of them to live on, so Moses relies on the school meals that we provide at Musoto Christian School where he attends.

But just like in the UK, the Ugandan Government closed schools to try and control the outbreak of COVID-19 last June, which meant that Moses no longer received his daily meal. Markets were also closed and Moses' grandmother had no other way to earn money to pay for food for them both, so their situation become very worrying.
Sadly, they were not alone - many poor families found themselves in similar dire circumstances.

But Moses is one of the children we support through our Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) project. Spotlight on Africa mobilsed themselves early on in lockdown to check on all the families in the OVC group. When they reached Moses, they found that he hadn't eaten for 2 days, so they immediately gave both him and his
grandmother porridge, followed by further nutritious meals and food to eat in the weeks ahead. Their intervention was timely and Moses’ grandmother gave her  heartfelt gratitude for saving their lives.

Spotlight on Africa has continued to support vulnerable children like Moses since the first lockdown. We are currently feeding and taking care of 120 OVCs in the Musoto community and another 97 children outside Musoto that the Mbale COVID-19 task force identified and asked Spotlight on Africa to help. When the school re-opened, they were able to receive the full support of our school based project, but Uganda has been thrown back into a sudden lockdown for the next
six weeks and these children find themselves isolated once again. They will starve without the urgent funds required to support a feeding programme.

Geoff is taking part in his ‘being sent to Coventry Bike Ride’

I'm planning on raising money for three separate charities by way of a bike ride totalling about 70 miles on September 11.

I've called the ride "Sent to Coventry" because it starts in the village of Brailes where I spent the first 18 years of my life, taking an
easterly loop to Coventry and returning via a westerly loop, mostly on small lanes. The route is inspired by my late mother who lived in Coventry and regularly cycled to Brailes on a bike with no gears to visit my father when they were courting. She maintained that there was only one hill on which she had to dismount! My bike is much lighter and has lots of gears which only partly compensates for my creaking body!