On Sunday 16th September, I'll be running in the 10k race at RunReigate. As well as being a personal challenge for myself, I'm taking the opportunity to raise funds for the New Surrey Performing Arts Library (NewSPAL).

The (existing) Surrey Performing Arts library is currently run by Surrey County Council, offering a superb service to hundreds of music and drama groups in Surrey and beyond - providing musical scores, play sets, specialist books and resources. However, in the face of severe budget cuts, Surrey County Council had proposed either full closure or moving and splitting the collection into mulitple libraries, and leaving it without specialist staff, to save money.

Individuals and groups across Surrey have come together with a plan to prevent this, and have set up NewSPAL - a newly formed charity overseen by users for users, offering to take over the running of the performing arts library from the country council to safeguard it for the future. NewSPAL is now set up, and expected to take over the full running of the library in the near future but needs to raise over £80,000 of funds, as well as subsantial volunteer time, to achieve these goals. I am hoping my run can raise some funds towards NewSPAL's target.

For more info about NewSPAL, see newspal.org.uk , and for details of Run Reigate, see https://www.runreigate.com/