Our aim is to help and give back to the community as much as possible, in more ways than one. Supporting these charities has not only helped them, but had a huge positive impact on our club!
So far this year, we have helped multiple different charities in various different ways. During breast cancer awareness month, we held a ‘wear pink to training’ to help spread awareness for breast cancer. The girls managed to smash our £100 target, raising £165 for breast cancer now. This is a charity that is very close to a lot of our club members, which was reflected on the posters we had up on the wall of ‘who we are training for’. A great way to bring us closer as a club, but also help raise money for an incredible charity.
A new charity Keele Netball club have also paired with this year is Luosko, a rescue, rehabilitate and re home German Shepard organisation, based here in Stoke. So far, we raised money for their charity via a tombola raising £461. We also are currently enrolling our girls to have their induction, to help at the kennels with the dogs such as walking, grooming, socialising and general maintenance of the kennels.
Recently, this month, we have just provided Stoke on Trent food bank with 58.3kg worth of food, meaning 138 meals for people in need. All of our teams generously donated food for this charity, which our charity secretary, Katie Walker, dropped off to them earlier this month.
Around this time of year, we are extremely lucky within our club that we have the opportunity to do fun things within our teams such as secret santa gifts, and Christmas parties. However, we know that unfortunately there are a lot of people who are in need of some extra help at Christmas, and we really wanted to give back! Our teams wanted to do the delivering joy Christmas tags for Dunelm this year, to help local families in need. From our club, we managed to donate lots of Christmas gifts to Royal Stoke hospital, the Salvation Army, Clayton community cupboard, crackles bank school and temple street church.
Alongside this, a special mention to both our club captain and vice club captain who have raised money for cancer charities individually by running half marathons throughout the year. Katie Wale (vice club captain), ran the Bournemouth half marathon in October of this year for breast cancer now and raised just over £1200! Meanwhile, Charlotte Masters (club captain) is on a mission to complete the 6 super half marathons across the world over the next 3 years, having already done Berlin and Cardiff. So far she has raised £2475 for cancer research!
We have lots of plans to continue raising money for charity throughout the year, our next charity event being ‘bring a pal to training’, where netball members can bring anyone along to one of our training sessions for a donation of £2. All of the money raised will be going towards dog toys and dog food for the rescue dogs at Luosko. Keep an eye on our social media for more updates on our upcoming events!