Be A Santa To A Senior 2024!
That's a wrap! We have concluded our Be A Santa To A Senior campaign for 2024 and here is a quick snapshot of the campaign.
We are thrilled to share the overwhelming success of our Be A Santa To A Senior (BASTAS) campaign for 2024. For those who may not know, each year we work with local businesses, schools and charities to organise and give gifts and cards to those who may be lonely at Christmas across our community in Swindon and the Vale of White Horse. 2024 saw our 6th year of spreading cheer and we thank everyone who donated either funds, gifts or time to ensure we could make this happen. The campaign is led by Cat, our Community Engagement Officer, and we must thank her especially for organising and coordinating everything so brilliantly. In total we gave out a whopping 170 gift parcels, and we’ll share our journey of the whole campaign below!
Firstly, a huge thank you to all the schools and nurseries who donated items:
Abbey Meads Primary School, Shaw Ridge Primary School, Shaw Ridge Pre School, Bridlewood School Swindon, The Cottage Nursery Watchfield, Broad Hinton Primary School, Oliver Tomkins Primary School, Holy Family Primary Swindon, Stanford in the Vale Pre School, Swindon Academy Beech Road, Swindon Academy Alton Road, Rodbourne Cheney Primary School, St. Hugh’s Preparatory School, Wantage C of E Primary School.
We also want to thank some local businesses and organisations.
Checkmore Ltd of Shrivenham Hundred Business Park donated funds to us to support the campaign – this was really appreciated so we could wrap everything and provide everything we needed for our party (keep reading!). We also had donations from Asda West Swindon, Asda Orbital Swindon and Tesco Extra Ocotal Way. Also a huge thank you to Swindon Big Knit who made us over 300 knitted items, including chocolate orange covers!
The office team had a great time dressing up Christmassy and wrapping our gifts and parcels up!
….and it was time to start giving them out!
A massive thanks to The Well Church, Abbey Meads in Swindon who, as well as donating gifts very generously, also hosted a party for us on 14th December with their brilliant volunteers. Swindon Seniors Forum were invited as well as members of Swindon Carers Dementia Peer Support Group, and other local seniors. Gifts were handed out to 45 people. It was a delightful day and we had a blast!
We also handed gifts out to those attending our Roves Farm Friendship Café and our Companionship Café in Stanford in the Vale.
There were some gifts provided to some of our own clients that would be lonely this Christmas, and we also donated gifts to Dementia Oxfordshire. To round things off, we donated 78 chocolate oranges (lovingly in our knitted chocolate orange covers from Swindon Big Knit!) to Alone at Christmas which is a project run by Christchurch Swindon where lonely people attend for a meal on Christmas Day.
We at Home Instead Swindon and Vale of White Horse wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!