Thank you to each and everyone who made our fundraisers such a success; to all those who dropped by and donated, to the local businesses* who donated generous raffle prizes, the bakers who made delicious cakes for us to sell but, most of all, to all the volunteers who gave their weekends to make the fundraisers happen. Whilst we will be announcing the raffle winners tomorrow, we wanted to share that our combined efforts have so far raised over £15,000. Many thanks again to everyone who has joined and helped us on the journey so far.

Whilst we have accepted financial donations since the day of the fire, we started actively fundraising. We noticed that requests received increasingly asked for new items only as survivors started to think beyond basic survival necessities and instead towards the future and rebuilding their lives. Given most of the donations we received were used clothing we decided to hold two fundraising weekends to convert these into funds we could use to help survivors buy the new clothing and homeware items they were requesting.

These individual requests often included items we didn’t have in stock so using financial donations we purchased those items upon request. Such requests included: phone chargers, plus-size clothing, nursing pillows, baby bottles, breast pumps, diabetic testing kits, new clothes for newborn babies and children in hospitals, microwaves, kettles, phones, sim cards, phone credit and hot food. We also provided small amounts of financial aid as and when needed by each family.