BRACKLEY COMMUNITY HOSPITAL 2020 TRUST
UPDATE – 1 August 2020
It’s time to spread a little more good news about the new hospital and the fundraising efforts over the past couple of months.
Hot off the press, our latest donation has come from the INEOS Community Fund which has granted us £10,000; thanks go to Mercedes AMG Petronas for the introduction here.
Over the past six weeks we have received £6,000 from the Town Mayor’s Charity which reflects the tremendous work achieved by Tony Bagot-Webb and his wife, Kareen, during a rather strange year of office which eventually lasted some 14 months but for which events were curtailed after less than 10 months.
We were the recipients of a grant of just over £5,000 from a group of local Masonic lodges which included contributions from Brackley, Banbury, Silverstone and Towcester.
As was reported last month, three local organisations (Brackley Rugby Club, Starlight Dance Academy and Brackley Spiderman) have undertaken their own initiatives and these together have brought in nearly £5,000.
Our Treasurer, Paul Bennett, had itchy feet and was very conscious of fundraising events being either cancelled or postponed. He had planned a street collection which was thwarted and he therefore produced a small leaflet inviting personal donations to the trust. Initially, he had 4000 leaflets printed and these have all been distributed around town; he is now on his second batch of 4000 which will include some coverage of surrounding villages. Individual donations, several of them anonymous, have totalled so far around £1,500 – we can only thank Paul and a few volunteers (whom I shall not name for fear of omitting one or two that I might not even know about!) for doing this and our contributors for their quick response.
The thermometer is therefore now well over £150,000 and we are within 10% of our original target of £165,000. This, however, will not be the end of it as, once the target for the x-ray machine has been reached, we will then start on raising money for the ultra-sound scanner, recliner chairs and television sets.
A final major donation – though not monetary – was the gift of an almost new high-spec recliner armchair from a Brackley resident. This was purchased for his father who sadly died before he could really benefit from the purchase. Ideally, the NHFT would like to have one of these chairs, which cost over £2,000 each, in each bedroom on the second floor, so this gift is another great boost.
With the goodwill and amazing generosity and initiative of local individuals, organisations and businesses, the targets will be reached, and our Community Hospital will be a flagship facility of which we can all rightly be proud.