brainstrust

Linda and Anne at the Children's Services Department in Havant took brainstrust to heart for a whole year. Together with their colleagues they arranged a great list of events from April 2006 to Easter 2007. We have given them their own page on our website to celebrate their fantastic acheivement. Read all about the events these star fundraisers organised to support brainstrust.

Total for a brilliant year of fundraising: £1,755.09!!

Fundraising Events

Spectacular Easter Finale!

Like Halloween, Easter had never been celebrated in the Havant Office, so never ones to miss a fundraising opportunity we decided to give the last event of our fundraising year an Easter theme. Our resident HIAS cake maker Jane very kindly donated a simnel cake for a guess the weight of the cake competition.

Our Easter cake table – always a hit in the Havant Office - raised £39.48

£65 was raised by running an Easter raffle. The prizes were bought with £20 which had been given to us by a colleague who found the note on the pavement.

Friday 23 March was our last fundraising day, and we thought it would be lovely to invite Meg to the Havant Office to meet us all. We certainly kept her busy announcing the cake winner(s), drawing the raffle and choosing the winner of our Easter bonnet competition.

But the best news …. when we had finished doing our sums, Children’s Services Department, Havant had raised £1,755.09 during the year. Fantastic!

Table Top Sale & Pet Paraphernalia

Helen, Anne and I got together one Saturday afternoon at the Hayling Community Centre and raised £110.37 from a Table Top Sale.

Pet paraphernalia was our next event. Although a little late for last Christmas, colleagues took the opportunity to do a bit of early Christmas shopping for presents for their pets, and helped us raise a further £24.61.

Unwanted Christmas presents

2007 got off to a good start with an unwanted Christmas present bring and buy sale. This is always a good opportunity to get rid of those unwanted gifts, unopened boxes of biscuits and those chocolates that you shouldn’t really be eating! And perhaps you may also find that little something that Santa forgot to bring you. We raised £214.12 during this two week event.

Halloween Event

Halloween has never been celebrated in the Havant Office before, so this was an ideal opportunity to set that right and also to raise some money for brainstrust - a total of £225. We asked people to wear something 'scary' and pay a £1 for the privilege! Always a hit in the office, is a bring and buy cake stall - this alone raised £45 and, with the grateful help of Hazel, we had place the head on the skeleton, pin the tail on the cat and find the witches coven competitions. The bottle stall was also a huge success: this raised over £100.

Two Leavers' Gifts

This afternoon we hit the £1,000 mark! Two girls from Governor Services who are leaving on Friday and both have donated their leaving present contributions to Brainstrust. This takes us up to £1,012.83!

Home-made / Home-grown Bring and Buy Sale

Once again everyone in the office helped us to raise money for brainstrust. A further £240 was raised during September. People were invited to donate home-made or home-grown produce which resulted in several tables of plants, jams, cakes, pies, fruit and vegetables.

Bring and Buy Sale

For three weeks during June we ran a Bring and Buy sale, which raised a further £327.28 for the charity. We asked colleagues to turn out their cupboards and drawers for those unwanted gifts that were gathering dust "just in case". Family and friends joined in with donations: we even received three hand-knitted dolls from Elsie who is 86 years old!

'Metatarsal' Word Competition

Margot Murray, the winner of our Metatarsal word competition receiving her prize from Joy.

The Quiz - How many words can you make out of the word "METATARSAL"?

World Cup Sweepstake

World Cup fever comes to the Havant Office! With Anne and I dressed in red and white we made daily visits around the office with the sweepstake basket. The first sweepstake was a sell out within 10 minutes!

Three days later we had completed three - making a total of £192. After we had taken out 3 x £20 prize money for the sweepstakes - won by Angela, Claire and Hilary - it left a satisfying £132 to be donated to brainstrust.

Indian Snacks Day

Simi Das from EMA very kindly offered to make some homemade Indian snacks towards our appeal for Meg.

Simi and her friends had certainly been very busy over the bank holiday weekend, and helped us to raise a further £73.40 on our second event.

Onion bhajis, pappadoms, pakora and chick peas went on sale mid morning and two hours later everything had been sold, leaving only a lovely aroma in the downstairs kitchen.

The First Event : "How Much?" Competition

For 10 days we ran a How Much competition. An old fashion sweet jar containing 1p, 2p and 5p coins was set up in the Havant Local Office and people were invited to try and guess how much was in the jar with a chance of winning £25, which was donated for the competition by Ken Wilby, English inspector.

On Friday 28th April the envelope was opened by Nicola, our HIAS birthday girl. The actual amount in the jar was £38.79. Maria Gillespie from EOTAS and Exclusions guessed the nearest amount and won £25. Great success our first event had raised £155.