We’ve already said it on Facebook, in person, and in emails, but we felt the need to say again… THANK YOU! Thank you to all our friends and supporters who helped us with the National Lottery campaign back in July. For anyone who hasn’t yet seen the update, we didn’t win, in the end, but we did give it our best shot!!
Despite the fact that we didn’t win, the campaign has helped us to spread the word about the charity. All those of you who helped by pestering friends and colleagues or by sharing our page on Facebook and Twitter, we cannot thank you enough. It is so important that we keep spreading the word about the important work that Petals is doing so that we are able to help the people who really need it, and this campaign has helped us to do just that. The growing number of friends and supporters, and the increased number of referrals, has also reiterated the need for the service that we offer. We at Petals now have renewed motivation to keep fundraising to keep the charity going and to extend the service as far as we can as soon as possible, so that we can keep saying yes.
The £10,000 grant that we had from the Big Lottery Fund allowed us to provide 250 counselling sessions last year. We have seen demand for our counselling rise dramatically in the past few months as word has spread about the charity, and we are now expecting demand to be for more than 3 times that figure in the next year. We have just taken on two new counsellors in Cambridgeshire to help to deal with this increase, and to ensure that we can still offer counselling when it is needed most. Our aim is to consolidate the service in Cambridgeshire, and then move on to extending the service to other hospitals as soon as we have the funds to do so. We will be focusing on fundraising from now on with this in mind, so watch our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter to see what we’re up to!
