Alan Boswell Group Charitable Trust – June 2021 update

The Alan Boswell Group Charitable Trust continues to deliver on its commitment to make a difference to charitable causes in the areas that we operate in. We wanted to share what our donations mean to some of the charities who have been given funds.

Between March and June of 2021, the ABG Charitable Trust committee processed 26 applications and have donated £77,480 to 13 different causes including:

• Access Community Trust – £23,000 towards equipment for an Outdoor Learning outreach project for young people.

• Anastasias Angels – £10,000 has been given to the family of Anastasia, a 6-year-old child who is suffering from a very rare and aggressive form of brain cancer. The grant will buy the much-needed equipment that she will need towards the end of her life.

• Nelsons Journey – £11,223 has been given to Nelsons Journey who will use the funds to continue their much-needed support services to children who have suffered bereavement.

• CoFarm – £5,000 has been given to support the work of Cambridge’s community farm who aim to end food poverty with their home grown produce. The food they grow is distributed in foodbanks around the city.

• Match funding of £670 was awarded to Stacey Koronowski from our Cambridge office, who raised funds for Magpas Air Ambulance Service by completing a skydive. Well-done Stacey!

Here are some of the amazing impacts that our grants have been making:

Read for Good:

”We are extremely grateful to the Alan Boswell Group Charitable Trust for their generous donation of £4,000 towards our work taking books and storytellers to children at Jenny Lind Children’s Hospital, Norwich in 2021. Children in hospitals are superheroes at the best of times but COVID-19 has posed an even greater challenge for children and their families requiring hospital admissions. Due to COVID, all toys in hospitals had to be thrown away and visitors were severely restricted. Our books were one of the few COVID secure resources available to children as they were brand new.

Your funding has also given us the security to explore alternatives to provision for storytelling for children. We know children need the distraction and comfort more than ever. So, our response has been to create a digital training package that all staff in medical settings can use. We quickly secured funding and created three training films to teach everyone storytelling skills, from paediatricians to porters. It’s a free resource, not only for the Jenny Lind Children’s Hospital but for the whole NHS and is available here. We would love you to share it with your staff – it might be helpful for parents and grandparents too!”

 NR5 Project:

In autumn 2020 we paid a grant of £3,000 to the NR5 Project, to enable them to provide Christmas Hampers to vulnerable and homeless people within the community and it looks like they did a great job!

”We estimated that we would send out 141 Christmas Hampers, however, Covid-19 has had a devastating impact on already vulnerable communities this year, forcing so many more into financial hardship. In the end, we sent out 242 Christmas Hampers. Including family members of recipients, 525 people benefitted from the Hampers this year, which simply would not have been possible without the funds provided by this grant.

We are very grateful to the Trust for providing the funds. We may not have been able to deliver the Hamper project at all this year without it, let alone scaling it up to the extent that we did. So, a final thank you to the whole Alan Boswell team.”

Ormiston Families

A donation of £2,000 was given to Ormiston families Mpower Project in Norfolk which aims to reduce the number of children being born into the care system and helps vulnerable women to turn their lives around. ”Over the last 12 months the grant from the Alan Boswell Group has enabled our Mpower project to work intensively with women leading chaotic lives and struggling with difficult life circumstances. Whilst not everyone referred engages with the service, of the women who have 80% have had no further pregnancies thus helping to break the devastating cycle of children being taken into care. Two clients moved into permanent part time work, which is a massive step forward for them and another two took up volunteering roles within the local community.”

You can find out more about The Alan Boswell Group Charitable Trust here.