By Mrs Johnson, Charities & Volunteering Co-Ordinator

Faithful followers of the School’s Twitter account may have seen the wonderful pictures of Ukrainian soldiers holding one of the sunflowers that was knitted by a team of students, staff and parents here at School. It travelled to Ukraine with journalist parent, Jason Farrell, who had it in his pocket as his lucky charm and left it with the soldiers there.

Last week, Mr Farrell came into school to share his eye opening experiences of reporting in Ukraine with us at our Monday assembly. We have so far raised over £2,800 for Unicef in Ukraine from selling these lovely knitted sunflowers and other initiatives. And the effort continues – in fact, we are aiming to make 1000 sunflowers to sell at Party in the Park on Sunday 26th June – and we are calling for knitters to join the team to help build stock to sell. If you are interested and would like to participate, please contact Mrs Duns who has been leading this amazing initiative.

Mr O’Regan, one of our visiting music (flute) teachers, is involved in The Ukraine Music Hub, who would like to help Ukrainians staying in the UK remain connected with music lessons, instruments and performing. They are especially looking for instruments that can be used for this worthwhile project. For more information see here. 

Over the past week we have been collecting items (100% cotton knickers, fabric (cotton or polycotton), travel soaps, flannels) and donations via Parent Pay for the amazing Days for Girls charity. The charity educates girls in developing countries about hygiene, menstruation, reproduction, self-defence and human trafficking. The charity has been running for 12 years and has reached two million girls in 144 different countries.  More importantly these schoolgirls do not have any access to menstrual kits and have to miss many days off school and suffer such stigma whilst sitting on rags or coconut husks. The group creates re-useable hygiene kits for the girls by hand sewing liners and bags and putting together hygiene kits, but they rely heavily on donations of knickers, fabric, travel soaps and flannels, which is where our donations come in! Days for Girls were delighted with all the donations – both items from the collection and money kindly given  via Parent Pay – thank you!

Thank you to everyone who donated food for Ealing foodbank to celebrate our school  ‘Acts of Kindness’ day.  The team at the Foodbank were extremely grateful and sent this message: “Thanks to everyone who contributed – all very welcome as our stocks are pretty low at the moment due to increased demand.”

Another thank you to everyone who contributed to our Toilet Twinning initiatives. We raised a total of £421 from students and staff coming into school wearing their own cultural clothes  – this is enough to pay for one whole school toilet block and three individual family toilets in Malawi.

Year 7 are continuing to fundraise at lunchtime and break for Refuge with a variety of activities, including a Staff-Student Kahoot Quiz, a bake sale, sweet sale and also set up a bar selling non alcoholic drinks to help raise money.  In addition they also held a market where bracelets and stickers were available to be bought. Our Charity Rep said of the Year 7 activities,” so many members of year 7 have been busily working to create pom poms to put on the beautiful bookmarks. As this is a whole year group charity event, collaboration has been a key element, and the event has really succeeded in bringing everyone together.”

Finally, for the keen runners out there, keep an eye out for an email to parents coming soon about our Ealing Half Marathon team which will be running for The Log Cabin on September 25th! We raised over £6000 for the Northfields charity in 2021 – with over 40 parents and staff members running. Can we beat our total this year?