This local charity has played a part in each of our lives, caring for people across Shropshire and Powys, looking after 3,000 families last year alone. Their work is fully dependent on charitable funds, with 87p in every £1 donated spent on caring in the Hospices, with Community Nurses, and additional services including Complementary Therapies and Lymphoedema management.

Choosing this charity is especially poignant in view of the loss of two of our rowing friends last year to cancer - Marc Christian and Gary Richards with Gary having taken part in the same challenge in 2021. Both of who were cared for by Severn Hospice and their team. Phil also talks of how in 2015 his family received the news that his mum (Helen) had been diagnosed with MND (motor neurone disease), and In late 2017, was given a bed in the Shrewsbury Severn Hospice. The Hospice team worked around the clock to care for his mum and also for his family, with Helen sadly passing away on the 19th December 2017.

Our second charity is the British Heart Foundation, who work to make “a world free of heart and circulatory diseases”. With two of us in healthcare, we have obviously encountered these conditions professionally, and seen the benefit of research into cures and treatments in our careers.

There are however more personal reasons as Deb talks about the tragic death of her husband Steve age 43, despite being extremely fit, dying suddenly of Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy - a congenital condition he was completely unaware of. “It has been a dream to compete in the world’s toughest row, stretching myself beyond anything I would have ever thought possible prior to Steve’s death, and an opportunity to help promote a charity obviously now close to my heart (pun intended)”.