“I’m dreaming of a White Christmas, Let it Snow and O come all ye faithful” – just three of the wonderful Christmas songs which will be performed at The Donna Louise Christmas Concert on Wednesday 13th December at the Kings Hall, Stoke.
Throughout the evening, guests will be entertained by four local choirs and a local ballet school as well as Britain’s Got Talent finalist, Beau Dermott, who recently released her first album after reaching the final of the talent competition last year.
In 2015, a team of 24 set off from Tower Bridge in 2 boats and conquered a 7 day, 500 mile row across open water to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. This intrepid group of travellers pushed their minds, bodies and spirits to the limit to raise over £300,000 to provide nursing care to children at The Donna Louise.
And now Tower to Tower is back - even tougher and more grueling than before!
This week has been filled with news of Pudsey’s adventures as he and his team raise money for Children in Need to support projects for children across the UK.
And we are all very, very excited that Pudsey will be joining our team at The Donna Louise. This is a brand new initiative and without the grant we would not be able to launch this new and much-needed project.
On Monday 6th November, we launched our new Business Partnership Programme, League of Heroes, at bet365 Stadium.
Business support is really important and contributes almost £500,000 a year to our fundraising total. Our business partnership programme is aimed at forming long-term relationships with our business community - working together to identify, develop and implement a fun and mutually beneficial partnership that’s uniquely tailored to each organisation.
It’s too early to talk about Christmas... #SoNotTrue
Here at The Donna Louise, we are already starting to get into the festive spirit and are getting excited about the whole host of Christmas events that we have coming up.
As a charity we’ve been known as The Donna Louise Children’s Hospice since we began in 1999 and, until a couple of years ago, we only looked after children up to the age of 19 so being called a “children’s” hospice suited us fine.
Two years ago we announced that we would no longer discharge our young adults when they reached 19. Of course, this was wonderful news for all our families, but it also meant that The Donna Louise was no longer just for children. With the children who come to The Donna Louise growing up into young adults, The Donna Louise brand had to grow up too.
At our recent AGM we asked one of our young ladies, 20 year old Charlotte, to talk a little about her experience of using The Donna Louise. After reducing about 80% of the audience to tears - she summed it up beautifully, when she said “The Donna Louise is ‘Just There’.”
Two innocuous, simple little words that can mean so much – “JUST THERE”
That is exactly what we aim to be – “JUST THERE” for children, young people and families to support them in any way we can.
See how they grow
The premise for The Donna Louise Enterprise Challenge was simple, each team taking part was given £50, and they had until the end of June to turn it into as much money as they could to support the children and families at the hospice. A record-breaking 42 teams took up the challenge and have raised a phenomenal £15,000 with more still coming in.
There was so much fabulous fundraising; judges had a very tough time picking the winners. Prizes were awarded to the winning teams at a special celebration event at the hospice on Thursday 20th July:
