Every year Great Oaks Hospice touches the lives of over one thousand people in our Forest of Dean community. Our outstanding hospice@home and community staff travel the length and breadth of our district providing end-of-life care with dignity and support families at the most difficult of times; while our hospice based team of caring professionals deliver Wellbeing programmes for those living with life-limiting illnesses, Coping with Change courses for those adjusting to cancer diagnoses, counselling and bereavement support for anyone bereaved in our Forest district, through to group and individual sessions of more complementary therapies than can be listed here.

Many of the services we provide at Great Oaks Hospice are not available anywhere else in our Forest of Dean district and our hospice provides a much-needed lifeline to our community when they need us most. The hospice truly is a hub for, not just our Coleford community, but our wider Forest community, and we are only able to do this because we are supported by amazing, selfless, generous people, community groups, small businesses, big companies, organisations and charities.

To keep Great Oaks Hospice caring we need to raise almost £1.5 million each year. We rely on our Forest charity shops, legacies, donations, charitable grants and fundraising activities to raise almost £1 million pounds, while our statutory funding covers the remaining third, but in April the government will be adding over £30k to our expenditure and we do not know where that money will come from. At Great Oaks we are careful with the funds we have available and we work hard not to be wasteful, but at a time when hospice funding is already very limited the additional £30k needed to meet the increased employer levies announced by the government has created a “gap” in our finances we really are not sure how to bridge and so we decided to launch our “Bridge the Great Oaks Gap” Fundraising Appeal.

Over the month of December 2024 and into early 2025, we are inviting everyone to join us and help us to “Bridge the Great Oaks Gap” in so that we will still be here caring for our Forest Community next December!