Abingdonian 2020

53 www.abingdon.org.uk Summer Term schools, delivering education and workshops aimed at increasing young people’s resilience around healthy lifestyles. Mind: Mind provides advice and support to empower anyone experiencing a mental health problem. They campaign to improve services, raise awareness and promote understanding. Their goals are focussed around empowering choice, enabling social participation, removing inequality of opportunity, and promoting organisational excellence. Close the Gap: Scotland’s expert policy advocacy organisation working on women’s labour market participation. Since 2001, they have been working with policymakers, employers and employees to influence and enable action to address the causes of women’s inequality at work. In the Michaelmas Term, the Charities Committee organised a home clothes day in the first half of term, followed by the annual Christmas Jumper Day held on the penultimate day of term. These events proved as popular as ever, and the Committee was able to raise a substantial amount of money from both, as well as see some entertaining and quirky Christmas jumpers. In addition, Lower School members of the Committee organised several doughnut and cake sales across the term. The third and fourth year production in the Lent Term; Every Brilliant Thing also raised £800 for Young Minds. In the Lent Term the Committee organised a foodbank collection for Abingdon Emergency Foodbank, asking students to bring in any food products with a long shelf life to deposit into boxes in their houserooms. The event ran for a week in February and we managed to gather two minibuses worth of items, which will be of great use to our local food bank, with Lower School donating the most of the school houses. In the Summer Term the Charities Committee organised a ‘Not Home Clothes Day’ owing to the fact that the school was online and all students were in their home clothes anyway. Instead, students were encouraged to wear items of clothing they usually wouldn’t wear at home to stand out more and participate in the event. Many participated, and we saw some amazing outfits and costumes from students and members of staff. The Summer Term also saw some tremendous individual efforts by students to raise money for charities close to their hearts and important to them. 2M as part of their ‘Journey to school challenge’ raised £3,700 for Cancer Research UK. First year Charlie Taylor along with his teammates raised over £1,300 for Abingdon United Football Club and for NHS fundraising. The Moldova Project volunteers also walked, ran, cycled and rowed the length of the Dniester river in Moldova to raise funds for the project and made over £2,000 for the cause. It has been a great delight to work with the Charities Committee and its host of enthusiastic volunteers to continue to organise events which have had positive impacts on our local community and internationally too. I would like to thank Mrs Ley for her committed leadership of the Committee and the hard work and long hours she has put into organising events. As a committee I think we should be very proud of what we have achieved in the past year, and I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish next year. George Nott, 6RKJ