As with previous years, in place of sending Christmas cards, Pound Gates will be donating £1,000 to our Acorn Fund, a partnership with Suffolk Community Foundation (SCF).
The Acorn Fund was established in 2013 to support local causes, and since its inception we have donated over £37,000 to 29 great causes.
The current theme for our grant-making is health and wellness, and we support people of all ages and abilities (or disabilities) to be more active and to lead healthy, balanced lives both physically and mentally.
In 2020 we donated £4,500 to three causes, including:
- Suffolk Cruse Bereavement Care - who support 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 - 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.
- St Augustine's Church in Ipswich - who received a smaller grant of £500 to support their work in establishing a separate community church in the Lindberg Road area of 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.
We’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all the joys of the season, and health and happiness throughout 2021.
