 News Archive

Donations With A Difference trustee Ella Brocklebank has a long running connection with Deborah Kellond, the Philanthropy Manager at homelessness charity Porchlight;so when she was asked if we could help make their Christmas lunch extra special, our team jumped at the chance. We were asked to provide Christmas treats for fifty of their service users.

Donations With A Difference trustees Will, Simon, Ella and Cheryl visited Team Ratcliffe for a cuppa, cake and catch-up. Since their first visit in July, Curtis (Curly) had taken delivery of his Smart Mustang Power Chair in mid-September and he has been making the most of his freedom and independence ever since.

Our friends at the Orchards Centre in Sittingbourne submitted a grant application for William Green-Rose, aged 9. William has a diagnosis of global developmental delay, epilepsy, right side weakness, optic nerve hypoplasia and visual impairment but he has gained some mobility over the years. This has meant that he needs lots of physical help to stand and walk, and as he develops further he needs more support which will be offered by the LiftVest we donated today.

Donations With A Difference is pleased to announce a grant of £400 to Tree Tots. The money will be used to buy initial equipment such as pots/pans/spoons, tarpaulin, and books, and will pay for other set up costs.

Tree Tots is a weekly outdoor under-5s group set up by two experienced primary school teachers, Joanna Flaifil and Stephanie McCullough. The group runs every Monday morning from 10am-12pm in the beautiful private woodland and smallholding of Whites Wood Farm. Their aim is to bring people together to provide exciting, outdoor opportunities for children, with a host of physical and emotional health benefits, and a support network and ideas for the adults. Parents/carers and their children are invited to join in with a range of exciting activities such as free, unstructured play, scavenger hunts, making food/insects out of natural objects, reading under trees, and climbing on fallen logs, and share in a snack and story/song time.

What better evening to have than to drink cocktails and raise money for charity? Donations With A Difference trustees Ella and Cheryl hosted a fun evening at Teatro's Cocktail Bar in Canterbury at the end of July for their colleagues in the construction industry. A great evening was had by all with £500 raised for the Donations With A Difference grant fund.

Thank you to everybody who entered our World Cup Predictor competition. With a number of unexpected results it was a difficult tournament to predict, but some of you did better than others. We had a tie for the overall winner between Robert Snook and Sam Weller on 207 points each. Rob was the top scorer in the first section of the competition (predicting the group matches), and also correctly identified France as the eventual champions. Sam made up ground in the second part with his selection of Harry Kane for the Golden Boot earning him a share of the top prize. Third place overall went to Kevin Harrison and fourth to John Sheather. The top scorer for the second section was Simon Gretton, but as a DWAD trustee he is ineligible for the prize so it goes to Peter Weller instead.

On Thursday 14th June Donations With A Difference partnered up with VSBW to run a second charity golf day. It was held at Chestfield Golf Club where we definitely experienced multiple types of weather, starting with very tough gusts of wind and finishing with lovely calm sunshine. It is therefore no coincidence that those who teed off later were able to achieve better scores.

Following the Kent Construction Golf Day and other fund-raising events, Donations With A Difference trustees Ella, Cheryl and Will visited Garry, Kyle and Curtis Ratcliffe to give them some good news.

When Cheryl Causebrook and Ella Brocklebank joined Donations with a Difference in December 2017 they knew they would be able to use their Kent connections to raise funds for great new projects.

Cheryl and fellow trustee Will Chan met Garry Ratcliffe in January, one of the BBC's DIYSOS dads from the massive knock down and rebuild on the Isle of Sheppey, and he spoke about their family's wish for Curtis, their 7-year-old, to have a head-operated power chair so he would be able to have his own independence for the first time in his life. They needed to raise £20,000 to purchase the chair. They had started their fundraising and had managed to raise £5,000 over two years.

Donations With A Difference have been friends of SeeAbility, a charity that helps people with disabilities and sight loss, since the summer of 2014; so when we heard that their Maidstone residents needed more equipment for their kitchen, our Trustees were happy to oblige with a donation of £540.61.

We're delighted that staff from Jenner Group have chosen Donations With A Difference as one of the charities that they are supporting in their National 3 Peaks Challenge. Donations With A Difference trustee Ella Brocklebank is part of Team Jenner and fellow trustee Cheryl Causebrook will be a driver on the challenge. The money raised through sponsorship is being split between three charities with Donations With A Difference, The Footprints Foundation, and the RNLI all set to benefit.

Over the last six months there have been some changes to the Donations With A Difference board of trustees that you might not necessarily have been aware of. This is our belated round-up of the changes, to thank those who have moved on and to welcome some new faces.

In April of this year our chairman Wayne Hodgson stepped down after four and a half years at the helm. Wayne has founded a new charity, the Red Eagle Foundation, and will be focusing his efforts on this going forward. The rest of the board would like to place on record their gratitude for everything that Wayne has contributed to Donations With A Difference since we started in 2013 and wish him all the best with his new venture. His tireless efforts have been a major part of our fundraising success and enabled us to award almost £40,000 in grants that have made significant improvements to people's lives.

Super10 may be over for another season but the Donations With A Difference charity football fun continues over the summer with the return of our World Cup Predictor competition. Have a go at predicting the scores in the group games, who will win each group, the overall winner, the runner-up and the top scorer. The more accurate your predictions, the more points you'll score. It costs £5 per entry and 40% of the money goes to the prize fund with the other 60% going to the charities that we are supporting (pick your preferred charity from the list and if you win, they will benefit).

After 4,640 matches, the 2017/18 Super10 season has come to an end and it's fair to say that it has been absolutely dominated by one individual. Not only did John Sheather win the overall competition with a massive 2,118 points, the highest score we've ever had, he also had the second best entry of all time with just 14 fewer points, well clear of Sam Brind in third place. Like many, John took advantage of our 3-entries-for-£10 offer. Unlike everybody else, all three of his entries finished in the top 10 with his weakest effort finishing a creditable 8th.

Born unconscious and not breathing at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich three years ago, Vivhaan Pradhan was immediately rushed to Kings College Hospital where his condition slowly stabilised. Two years later, with learning and mobility difficulties, Vivhaan was finally diagnosed with Bilateral Cerebral Palsy.

At the annual Housing Conference in Brighton, Donations With A Difference trustee Cheryl Causebrook organised a networking reception for Kent and Sussex construction businesses. Six businesses sponsored the event at Buddy's in Brighton, a deconstructed breakfast with G&Ts and Bloody Marys.

A fantastic £900 was donated to Donations With A Difference.

Every year Canterbury Fire Station hits the streets and collects money for their chosen charities. This year Donations With A Difference was one of the charities selected by the station to receive funds.

Rob George, a local firefighter, submitted DWAD to the station's charity rep Kevin McCalden due to the Kent-focused grants DWAD supports and having been encouraged by their achievements throughout 2017.

Jacob Marley is nearly 5 years old; he lives with quadriplegic cerebral palsy and has dystonia, spasticity and seizures, and is PEG-J fed caused from a lack of oxygen at birth. Donations With A Difference recently provided Jacob with a GoTo seat. A GoTo seat is a safe, supportive, lightweight and portable seat designed to provide additional upper body postural support for children with disabilities.

With financial support from Donations With A Difference, Relate has started delivering a play therapy project at under-resourced primary and secondary school The Orchard School in Canterbury to help vulnerable youngsters access one-to-one talking therapies to improve their future well-being. For these children it’s their last chance at securing an education. They struggle to go to school and have bad behaviour and low attendance.