As well as the Inspire grant I have had support from my parents' help and from my school, De Lisle College, to set up a variety of fundraisers over the past few weeks.

The first thing we did was set up a GoFundMe for friends and family who said they wanted to help but we didn't like just asking for donations - it felt wrong somehow - so we also set up a "Buy a Date" crowd funder where people could 'buy' dates from the 2024 calendar for £2.50. At the closing date we put all the bought dates into a random name generator and the date that was picked won 20% of the funds raised. This proved very popular and the winner was so lovely and donated her winnings back into the kitty.

Working with the lay preachers at De Lisle College we held a donut sale. Did you know that Krispy Kreme run a fundraising package? Neither did I until I started my fundraising journey!! What a tasty way to raise funds! This donut sale proved to be a massive success, selling all of the donuts we had bought (over 5 dozen!) to staff and students alike, as well as having some teachers giving us donations on the day.

I also performed at Bawdon Lodge Farm near Loughborough for an hour on 16th March, performing some of my favourite songs from pop and musical theatre. Some of the customers were very generous with donations being given throughout the performance either in person or via the link to my GoFundMe page.
It was also invaluable in giving me experience of singing, unscripted, to a live audience. I am used to performing to a script so to sing with no script is actually quite daunting but everyone was lovely and so supportive.

To finish off the fundraising we held a quiz night at The Pumping Station, Cropston - inspired by ten of my favourite songs to sing from the Musicals. It was a very friendly and fun environment, and as a part of the quiz, I sang a 10-20 second extract of each of those favourite songs for people to guess, as a reminder of what the fundraising was for.

With all of these events, and the help of the JHMT Inspire grant, we have reached our goal and have managed to cover all the costs involved for the skills residential and I am really looking forward to heading down to Kent on Tuesday for the week which looks like it is going to be just fantastic.

I will try and blog from the residential itself but the programme looks pretty full on so it may need to wait until I get back but thank you to everyone who has supported me on this latest leg of my journey.