What’s next?

Where has the summer gone? I really can’t believe it’s 7 weeks since our amazing launch day. We were so lucky with a beautiful summer’s day, which meant we were able to fully utilise the stunning outside space at our new home St Michael’s hospice. The launch was well attended by many of our support group members along with the Mayor, the Herefordshire High Sheriff, staff from the Macmillan Renton Unit and some of the local media. We had speeches with a back drop of the gorgeous gardens and Herefordshire countryside and then we all enjoyed tea and cake and a good old chat, followed by a Tai Chi session with the wonderfully calming John Burgess. All our group members got one of our fabulous care packages to go home with for which we’ve had lots of great feedback.

As a committee all our focus for sometime had been on a successful launch and getting charitable status. With the first ticked off and being well on our way to achieving the second (fingers crossed, any day now we should have charitable status) we are now all back from our various holidays and school holiday childcare duties and it’s time to shift our focus to some serious fundraising. Our support group sessions are going well both online and our in person sessions at St Michaels and we are well supported by our expert speakers and group members. We have created thoughtful, useful welcome packs for our members which are loved by all who have received them but we don’t want to stop there. Our next aim is to provide much needed psychological support to our members by providing free one to one counselling with a specialist counsellor. To be able to provide this to anyone with a diagnosis of breast cancer we need to raise significant amounts of money. To help with this aim we are excited to be joined by Wendy Daykin who has many years experience working in the charity sector and has generously agreed to give up her spare time to head up our fundraising committee and look after the mystifying activity of keeping Twitter updated. We are also very lucky that some of the wonderful women I’ve met through my cancer journey have also come on board to help with fundraising too.

We have big plans for 2022, all of which are currently top secret, but we will be out and about in Hereford during this October which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, raising our profile and hopefully raising some money. We also have two people running the London Marathon for us, Becki in London and myself running around Herefordshire. So if you see us around please come and say hello!