Cash giveaway: Vote for your favourite charity to win a share of £16,000
YOUR favourite local paper is giving local charities the chance to take a share of an amazing £128,000 cash giveaway.
The Press’ parent company’s charitable arm, the Gannett Foundation, is providing £128,000 in cash to support local charities across the country and, across our titles in Scotland, we have a £16,000 share to give away.
And we asked YOU to decide where this money should be spent. You nominated in your thousands and our editorial teams across Scotland and our title in Northern Ireland chose a shortlist of 10 charities from these nominations that will share in the £16,000.
They are: Glasgow Times – Action Against Asbestos; The Herald – Cancer Support Scotland; Greenock Telegraph –Greenock Medical Aid Society; Ayrshire –Sense Scotland Touchbase Ayrshire; Clyde – Finding Your Feet; Borders Telegraph – Galashiels Foodbank; Dunfermline Press / Central Fife Times – Fairway Fife; East Lothian Courier – Roots and Fruits; Impartial Reporter – Fermanagh Brightstarz; and
Scottish Farmer – RSABI.
OUR chosen charity put the needs of their service users first – and it will be them who decide on what happens with their portion of the money.
Dunfermline-based Fairway Fife helps young people with learning difficulties to have “lived experiences” of being a teenager and build friendships as they move into adulthood.
“They miss out on all that natural friendship learning curve, they’re usually out with a parent or carer or a support worker which is just not a natural situation,” Jaqui Dow, the charity’s chair, explained.
“Parents and support workers don’t want to do the same things that a young person wants to do, they don’t get that lived experience of being a teenager, that natural progression into adulthood.
“We provide peer support. We recruit volunteer mentors who are the same age – and do all the things people that age should be doing, whether that’s going to a football match or shopping.
“It just gives them a different outlook on life. One example is one of our girls, who is 18, was still wearing crumpled dresses because that’s what her mum likes and she would wear what her mum would wear.
“She was going to a party and went shopping with some of the girls and bought some really nice, trendy stuff. Little things like that make such a difference.
“If you have a learning difficulty, unless you are experiencing it, you don’t understand what choices are out there.
“It’s giving them that lived experience of being a teenager and therefore going into adulthood with a much more balanced outlook on life, and also giving them the experiences so that they can say to their parents ‘No, I don’t want to do that, I want to go to the pub on a Saturday afternoon and have drinks with my friends’.”
The majority of money spent by the charity goes towards funding days out – such as cinema trips and nights away in Glasgow – while they also work with places like Lochore Meadows to provide young people with water sports experiences.
Service users help to create cycle paths at the park, with their efforts rewarded with free access to equipment.
Giving back to the community is essential to the charity and they provide opportunities to work with groups like the Pars Foundation, who run football sessions and Walk and Talk meetings, Duloch in Bloom, who develop garden areas in Dunfermline, and Grow West Fife, where they learn about how to harvest and grow different foods.
Recently, fruits and vegetables grown by volunteers have been given to families in need.
“Parents are blown away by the difference they see in their son or daughter, in their confidence levels, in their ability to make choices.
“They say they cannot believe how much these people grow into well-developed, healthy, and physically active adults,” Jaqui said.
Many of the mentors who are involved with the service go on to jobs in the care sector, having the experience necessary to work with people with learning difficulties from a young age.
And any funds from the competition would go towards their mission of providing experience for both their service users and their volunteers, with the decision of how that money is spent in their hands.
“We are always looking at developing our services, setting up projects, it could go towards equipment for water sports, it would depend on how much we got,” Jaqui said.
“It could go towards a night away for them, the kids want to go and see a show and spend a night in Edinburgh, we’ll consult with the guys and ask what they would like to spend it on. It’s their charity so they are very much involved in what we do.”
NOW we are putting the power to allocate the cash back into the hands of our readers – you are now invited to collect tokens from our newspapers which can then be handed in to the Press or posted.
Each token collected will then be used to allocate cash to the nominated charity – so if your favourite charity collects 50 per cent of all to tokens collected, it will receive 50 per cent of the £16,000!
You can find the tokens on page 24.
Just send your tokens to Dunfermline Press, Forsyth House, Pitreavie Drive, Dunfermline, KY11 8US, or you can pop down to our office with them in person during normal working hours.
Newsquest terms and conditions will apply where relevant to the grants process; please visit http://www. newsquest.co.uk/prize-competition-rules.