NEWS

The Blide Trust have been lucky enough to have been chosen as one of the two charities the Edrington Group (Owners of Highland Park) are going to be supporting through their massive EPIC fundraising event this year. The money raised will then be triple matched by Edrington, meaning that for every £1 donated £4 will be making its way to the charities!

When we were approached by Highland Park and asked what we might spend any money raised on, our initial answer was it depends on whether the events would raise £500 or £5000. When we discovered the extent of these fundraising challenges we were astounded! The money raised by the Edrington Group is going to make a huge difference to our service. Due to the increase in demand for support our wee building is bursting at the seams! We have 8 front facing members of staff, over 200 members of the service and only 2 meeting room spaces. So what we’re going to spend the money on is to build a room in our garden to host support meetings and as a space for therapeutic art and wellbeing projects.
In 2022 we accessed Young People’s Mental Health Covid Recovery Funds and were able to employ a worker, specifically for supporting care experienced young people, and were inundated with local need for this. These funds will allow us to extend this position to continue supporting a very vulnerable part of our community. We honestly cannot say thank you enough to them for their support!

Craig is heading down to the final fundraising event in Glasgow on Friday September 1st to accept the cheque and to speak a bit more about the work the Blide does in the Orkney community. They will also be showing a promotional video of the Blide that was carefully and lovingly put together by the Wonderful Catherine Leask from the Highland Park marketing team! As soon as we have a copy of this we will make sure it goes on the website for all to see!

One of our members, who also acts as a board member and member rep for the Blide, Nick Lovick will also be travelling down to Glasgow to represent the Orkney Blide Trust on this 210km charity cycle taking place across August 31st and September 1st. He has set up a Just Giving page linked to the Edrington group page which means these funds will be triple matched too. At the time of writing he has raised over £2,800 meaning that just through his involvement there will be over £11,000 going to these charities. To donate to this wonderful event the link can be found below:

https://www.justgiving.com/team/teamblide

The event has a Just Giving page set up already, which can be found at:

https://www.justgiving.com/campaign/epic4-Scotland