Witham couple raise over £20,000 for Farleigh!

"After our son Daniel had problems with his health when he was young, Sue and I wanted to raise money for a charity that serves the local community, so we decided to support Farleigh Hospice. It cares for so many people at its hospice building and in their own homes, so if you don’t know someone who’s been helped by Farleigh now, you will do in the future.

I used to go to Farleigh once a month at its old building in London Road to run bingo for the day patients and this brought back memories of when my best man had end of life care there, so we also have a personal connection which motivates us to keep raising money.

When Sue and I were running the constitutional club in Witham, we did a few things there including a New Year’s weigh-in where people who’d put on weight over Christmas were sponsored to lose it again with the money going to Farleigh.

I ran a bingo session on a Monday night with one house called the Hospice Hustle which raised money for our hospice pot.

We also held a raffle where most of the prizes were donated. We did that every week and, thanks to the generosity of our members, the club would give Farleigh a cheque for about £2,000 each year.

Sue and I are quite keen gardeners and we are into making hanging baskets so we decided to get our garden done up. A mate suggested that we have a party there afterwards, so we had a few friends over and raised £137.

We now make about 100 hanging baskets a year and any money we make from selling them goes to Farleigh.

We’ve been running our garden party for 18 or 19 years now. We’ve only got a little garden and half of it’s full up with vegetables, but this year we managed to get 60-odd people in and we’ve had our best ever result, raising £2,400!

It’s a family effort and I’ve got good neighbours and friends that help too. My daughter Penny runs our little bar and Daniel, who’s a chef, does the cooking on the barbecue with my best mate.

We have a silly game to get people started, like ‘how many coins in a pot?’ – I put 50p coins in the top and smaller ones in the bottom to make it harder to guess! This year, we had well over 100 prizes donated for our raffle and held an auction afterwards.

When we started our parties, Penny bought me a pair of union jack swimming trunks that cost £6 out of her pocket money and we auctioned them.

Every year since, whoever gets them brings them back and they go up for auction again. Those £6 shorts must have raised hundreds of pounds!

Our garden parties alone have raised around £18,500. We are very lucky to have the support of our family, neighbours and other friends - none of this would have been possible without them.

Everyone tells us how much they look forward to our garden party each year. Sue and I put a lot of effort into organising it but it’s always worth it when we count the money and find out how much we’ve raised for Farleigh!”

We want to say a huge thank you to Colin and Sue and their family and friends for their wonderful support.

If you would like more information on how you can raise money for Farleigh Hospice and for more fundraising ideas click here