Fundraising for charity by climbing mountains, eating cake & working as a team!

Throughout 2019 and 2020 we chose Tiny Toes to be our ‘charity of the year’. The charity we focus all our fundraising efforts on in order to help try and make a difference. 

Read on to find out why we chose Tiny Toes and how we managed to raise funds.

Tiny Toes is a campaign run by East Kent Hospitals Charity, raising funds to support the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the William Harvey Hospital, and the Special Care Baby Unit at the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in Margate.

As a team, we managed to raise £2295 via online donations, with cash donations still to be counted!

Anthony Klokkou, our Managing Director, proposed Tiny Toes as the charity of the year as he’d experienced their great work himself.

“As a team, we voted on Tiny Toes from a group of charities. Tiny Toes was my proposal as I have experienced first hand the great work they do. 

They supported my wife and me during the birth of our daughter, at a time when we felt truly helpless as parents. And I am pleased to say that she came through her early difficulties quickly!

For Lucy and I, the challenges were absolutely eased by the incredible work that William Harvey’s Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit does, along with the fantastic support that Tiny Toes facilitate for the wider family. Thank You!”

In order to achieve this amount in donations, team GIANT took on some interesting challenges alongside the usual way of fundraising.

Activities included;

• Many a ‘GIANT Bake Off’ where teams would choose a challenge every month, bake away and then put some pennies in the pot to try their tasty creations. 
• A bake sale and raffle which was hosted throughout the team, as well as across the building we operate in Folkestone. 
• A friendly bet on the Grand National saw many competitive GIANTs involved.

  

• Pancake Day, of course, saw people donate to get their hands on some custom made pancakes throughout the day.
• Prank Wars. Donating some money to be part of a prank war across the office that saw desks moved, wheels from chairs removed and cars clingfilmed. A lot of laughs were had.
• Ant and his wife Lucy took on the London2Brighton, a 100km ultra-marathon from the capital to coast. It took them quite a while, but they did it and it was AMAZING.
• And a group of 14 GIANTs took on the Yorkshire Three Peaks in August where the weather wasn’t particularly pleasant. The group split in two, one group walked it, the other group ran it!

Dee Neligan, Fundraising and Development Officer for East Kent Hospitals Charity said:

“We were delighted to be nominated as Charity Of The Year for Sleeping Giant Media. It’s been a real pleasure to watch the fundraising journey that the GIANTS undertook, and we are overwhelmed with the incredible amount that they have raised.

These funds will be used to purchase equipment such as screens, allowing parents privacy and comfort when breastfeeding on the ward, and improvements to the parent accommodation. We know that this will make a huge difference to the babies and families using the NICU and SCBU, and we are so grateful to Sleeping Giant Media for their support.”

As a team, we are all extremely proud to have supported Tiny Toes and helped raise awareness of the cause. 

Ant would like to say “a massive thank you to all of those Giants, friends and families who supported us!”.