London Marathon 2015 fundraiser

Where's the sponsorship money going?

 

I am running the London Marathon in April 2015 to raise funds for The Rossendale Trust, a charity that supports people with learning disabilities. The Trust seeks to promote freedom of choice, encourage independence, and help to develop individual identity with an aim to giving people ownership of their own lives and futures. 

 

 

Specifically, the money I raise will go towards buying a vehicle for the Oakwood Day Service. Oakwood is a service provided by the Rossendale Trust. Open to the whole community, Oakwood offers a wide range of activity groups in full or half day sessions. The focus of the Day Service is to develop social and life skills in a relaxed environment, and aims to integrate people with learning disabilities into the community, both locally and further afield; for example, the Horticulture group volunteer themselves to maintain public spaces, such as local church gardens. Also, the Day Service has a regular stall at the indoor market at Leek, where service users sell crafts made by the Arts and Crafts group and the Woodwork group, as well as plants grown and potted by the Horticulture group.

 

 

The Rossendale Trust & Oakwood Day Service is set in the Cheshire countryside, around 2 miles from Macclesfield. Although the surroundings are beautiful, it is pretty isolated, so the Oakwood Day Service would really benefit from a vehicle to get the service users out into the community and access other social experiences that at present are difficult to reach due to service users’ specific needs and a lack of appropriate transport. 

 

 

The Rossendale Trust and Oakwood Day Service do their best to enrich the lives of the people they support, but extra transport would enable them to provide so much more. There are 2 sessions a day at the Day Service, so a vehicle would touch the lives of so many vulnerable people, and help them to live a more ‘normal’ life, as so many of the things that most of us take for granted, such as hopping on the bus, meeting a friend in town for a coffee, attending a social club - are so much more difficult to access if you have specific needs or disabilities. Please sponsor me to help enhance and expand the lives of the people I work with, it would be a generous gift that would be utilised and appreciated every day for years to come. 

 

 

 

 

Yours Sincerely, 

 

 

 

Karl Downing