Pound Gates has donated £4,500 to local charities through its Acorn Fund, a partnership with Suffolk Community Foundation (SCF). The three charities to receive grants, include: Suffolk Cruse Bereavement Care, Selig (Suffolk) Trust, and St Augustine’s Church in Ipswich.
The charities were selected from a number of causes put forward by SCF. The Pound Gates’ teams voted on which charities would receive grants from money raised through their regular fundraising activities. The pot was boosted this year by an extra £1,000 from the staff’s social club fund. Again staff voted how to spend the money, as no social events had taken place since the pandemic started, and the overwhelming result was to add it to the Acorn Fund.
Suffolk Cruse Bereavement Care supports the mental wellbeing of bereaved people and helps them to understand their grief and to cope with their loss. The grant of £2,000 will go towards the cost of continuing to run their ‘Children and Young People’ work. As well as core funding for this project, the funds will support training new and existing team members.
Selig (Suffolk) Trust is a Christian charity working in Ipswich and surrounding areas with churches and local communities to provide services to homeless people. The grant of £2,000 will help Selig reach their £135,000 target to convert their premises to provide shelter to homeless people during the pandemic, who have seen their regular communal sleeping areas closed.
A smaller grant of £500 was awarded to St Augustine’s Church in Ipswich to support their work in establishing a separate community church in the Lindberg Road area of Ipswich.
The Acorn fund was established in 2013 in partnership with Suffolk Community Foundation and we have donated over £37,000 to 29 great causes. The current theme for our grant-making is Health and Wellbeing. We support people of all ages and abilities (and disabilities) to be more active and to lead healthy, balanced lives both physically and mentally.
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