11 minute read
Report focuses on Scotland’s legacy market
[THE SCOTTISH LEGACY MARKET is vibrant and growing, with gifts in wills transforming the voluntary sector landscape. Increasingly, Scottish charities are turning to legacies, recognising the potential and resilience they offer. Those were the conclusions of a joint report on the Scottish legacy market by Remember A Charity, Legacy Foresight, the Institute of Legacy Management and Smee & Ford.
The report, Scotland: Building back stronger with charitable legacies, explores the role of legacies for Scottish charities. It features the latest market data, new survey findings, commentary from experts in the field and recommendations for legacy fundraising in times of uncertainty.
Its introduction quotes a number of legacy administrors in Scotland, including Sarah Morgan, legacy development officer at Erskine, who said: “Legacies are what’s kept us going through the pandemic. Regardless of the fact that they bring in around half our income, they have been a constant cash stream when so much else had to stop; our door-to-door campaigns and all our events. Legacies have been the one constant that we’ve been able to rely on. It’s hard to imagine how we would have survived without them.”
The researchers’ analysis shows that over £90m of legacy income is donated to Scottish charities every year, forming a bedrock of sector funding. Over the past two decades the number of Scottish charitable estates has grown by over a quarter, and the value of those estates has trebled. And those trends are set to continue, the researchers found, creating vast opportunities for those charities with the ambition to convey their legacy vision to a new generation of legacy donors.
In its Executive Summary, the report quotes Rob Cope, chief executive of Remember A Charity: “Legacy giving may be less prevalent currently in Scotland, but consumer studies show that Scottish people are even more willing to consider leaving a gift than those south of the border. So, there’s an even greater opportunity for growth. Scottish charities that open up conversation with supporters about legacies are moving towards an open door.”
The report is available to download from the Legacy Foresight website at legacy-link.co.uk. q
A small charity with a huge heart
[KIDNEY KIDS SCOTLAND, a very small charity with a huge heart, has for the last 20 years supported Scottish children with renal and urology conditions. The main aim of the charity has always been to enable these children to receive treatment as close to home as possible and minimise disruption to the family unit.
In addition the charity helps hospitals all over Scotland, supplying them with much needed equipment and funding posts recognised as being essential. Chronic Kidney disease is a condition that has no cure and that children and their families must learn to live with.
IMAGINE your child only being able to drink 400mls in one day. That’s less than two cartons of juice – a can of juice is 500mls.
IMAGINE being a parent where you must be home before 8pm every single night to ensure your child gets their daily home dialysis.
IMAGINE not being able to take your family abroad or too far away from the hospital because your child cannot go without their dialysis. This HAS to happen in hospital 3 or 4 times EVERY week.
IMAGINE your child missing out on school education, social activities, family members’ birthday celebrations, a sibling’s sports day or a family wedding because you need to make sure they receive their life saving dialysis treatment.
IMAGINE your child spending their birthday and/or Christmas Day in hospital and not being able to see their friends from week to week. q
IMAGINE LIVING WITH KIDNEY DISEASE
For more information about Kidney Kids Scotland please visit our website at www.kidneykids.org.uk, call 01324 555843 or email office@kidneykids.org.uk Kidney Kids Scotland can help in many ways
Give a gift to those who need it most this Christmas
At Christmas time we often focus our fundraising on the infant health side of our work in Haiti. This has been a large part of our mission since Hope Health Action (HHA) was founded. This year, it’s on our hearts to spread some festive joy to the beneficiaries across the world that our projects benefit, including maternal health, disability rehabilitation, malnutrition relief, community and refugee education.
The story of Jesus’s birth in a dirty stable is now over 2,000 years old, however, mothers are still having to bring their children into the world in equally poor conditions around the globe today.
Since 2006, Hope Health Action has strived to provide life-saving healthcare to mothers and babies at our partner hospital in Haiti, Hospital Convention Baptiste d’Haiti, which cares for around 20,000 patients each year. Alongside this, we started up a respite centre for children with disabilities and founded the first spinal cord injury rehabilitation unit. More recently, we have expanded our healthcare and disability care across East Africa and are currently responding to the growing refugee crisis in Uganda as a result of the conflict in South Sudan. But with so many that are still in need of urgent care, the need for improved healthcare services and equipment is clear.
This Christmas we are launching a new #GreatestGift appeal to provide ‘Gifts of Hope’ for those who otherwise will not be receiving anything to unwrap this festive season. These Gifts of Hope will enable our beneficiaries across the world to receive the very best care available and will provide a better working environment for the staff, more privacy for the patients at our partner hospital and life-saving treatment to refugees who are malnourished.
This Christmas, you can spread some festive joy to the world’s most vulnerable across Haiti and East Africa. Our Gifts of Hope catalogue offers a large selection of items and services our beneficiaries are most in need of. Each gift you purchase will facilitate sustainable, innovative and life-saving health and disability care to the most vulnerable in some of the world’s poorest countries. Whatever gift you choose, you will be
spreading a little extra cheer this Christmas.
Your donation will provide HHA supported families and children with a gift they really need. When you give a gift to someone in need through HHA, you can trust that your gift will be hand-delivered by a local staff member who knows and loves them.
On behalf of everyone at Hope Health Action, please accept our deep thanks for your continued support and may we wish you and your members a very Happy Christmas. May you all know the peace and hope of this special time of year, and be encouraged by the incredible difference we can make together in 2022.
With love and thanks
[HOPE HEALTH ACTION’S mission is to build long-term partnerships with local communities and health systems to facilitate sustainable, innovative and life-saving health and disability care for the most vulnerable. We are driven by the call of Jesus - loving others, as we would wish to be loved ourselves. We seek to bring hope, health and action to the world’s poorest and believe every person has the right to quality healthcare without discrimination.
HHA has been working in Haiti for almost 15 years supporting Hospital Convention Baptiste d’Haiti, one of the leading hospitals in the north of the country. We’ve been working alongside local Haitian staff and leaders to support their vision, expand their medical training, access new technologies and essential equipment, grow their hospital facility and ensure their community has access to critical and comprehensive health and disability care.
Alongside our continued passion and focus for Haiti, we have recently expanded into East Africa where we have been working in the refugee settlements, providing life-saving food to treat severe and acute malnutrition, empowering the most vulnerable to tackle food insecurity, providing South Sudanese refugees with lifetransforming wheelchairs, and equipping Ugandan refugee settlements with blood pressure and heart rate devices to fight maternal mortality.
Responding to our Christmas appeal gives HHA the resources to make real change to the provision of health and disability care in some of the world’s most deprived communities. Health development is at the heart of HHA’s mission but we also run appeals which help us respond to emergencies such as the refugee crisis in East Africa and the effects of natural disasters in Haiti.
Please check out our website at www.hopehealthaction.org for more information about how your gifts can make a real difference to the lives of so many in need. q
Caring for cancer without animal experiments is this trust’s aim
[ANIMAL-FREE CANCER RESEARCH is the ethos of the Caring Cancer Trust (CCT), which funds groundbreaking, ethical, animalfree research into cancer, its non-invasive treatment, cure and prevention.
CCT has its own ‘Stopcancer’ laboratory research programme that does not use live animals or embryonic stem cells. Over the past 20 years CCT-funded oncology researchers have discovered potential new causes of children’s cancer, developed new treatments for early-stage cervical cancer and are now advancing knowledge for the prevention of cancer.
Cancer prevention
Cancer treatment and cure are obviously good, but cancer prevention is best, since it avoids the stress of the dreaded cancer diagnosis and the debilitating treatments which follow.
CCT believes that one way to prevent cancer is to correct the damage caused by environmental pollution. It is very clear that the world we live in is now polluted with toxic chemicals in the home, in the air we breathe and in the land on which we stand. Indeed, environmental pollution from industrial farming has produced drastic changes in the microbes found in the soil in which our food is grown. That results in loss of microbial diversity, which produces ‘sick soil’.
The types of microbes found in our gut come from the soil and they are essential for our health and wellbeing. It is very simple: sick soil produces sick humans, sick animals and plants, and correcting that should reduce the incidence of cancer. Our polluted world actively encourages cancer and CCT funds an integrated approach to cancer research which aims to identify cancer risk factors in our lifestyle, and the environment we live in.
Cancer support
CCT also provides special ‘Youth2Go’ Healing Holidays of creative adventure for children recovering from cancer, enabling them to regain their self-confidence and reignite their passion for life after the trauma of their illness and lengthy treatment. In addition, they provide financial support for adult cancer sufferers to ameliorate their sickness, improve their quality of life, limit their stress and, where possible, help their recovery.
A cancer-free future
CCT-funded research aims to increase understanding of how silent infections, lifestyle, diet, genetic predisposition and environmental pollution lead to different types of cancer in children and adults. Indeed they have identified simple changes in lifestyle and diet which, combined with avoidance of exposure to environmental contaminants, will reduce the incidence of cancer in all age groups.
The CCT aims to identify and understand hitherto-unknown cause-and-effect relationships to either limit exposure to such carcinogenic factors or devise therapies which suppress their effects before a cancer has developed.
Prevention now saves treatment later
The CCT research mission for cancer prevention involves: • New lifesaving cancer prevention medicines • New therapies for cancers in their early • stages • Analysis of the role of microbes in • causing cancer • New therapies for later-life cancers • Heightened cancer awareness by GPs • and public • Lifestyle, diet and environmental • changes for cancer avoidance • Dissemination of trial results relating to • cancer treatment and prevention
Funding
Caring Cancer Trust’s Stopcancer programme is entirely managed and run by unpaid volunteers and financed by legacies and donations. A gift to them funds animalfree research into cancer treatment and prevention as well as Youth2Go creative adventure holidays for children recovering from cancer.
In short, they aim to create a cancer-free tomorrow for the children of today. q
Bili from Bulgaria
[BILI WOULD HAVE BEEN wild caught as a baby and then smuggled in on the black market and somehow ending up in Bulgaria. He spent the first 15 years of his life in a circus performing for the public and doing what his owner told him to do. He then spent 15 years on his own in a small concrete enclosure. He didn’t have anything more than a blanket and a stone platform for his bed.
Jan Garen from Wales Ape & Monkey Sanctuary takes up the story: “Bili is now 40 years old and in Sept 2011 we made the 4,000-mile round trip in our ambulance to rescue him from Bulgaria. The long journey, although tiring, went well. When we arrived back at the sanctuary Bili was as bright as a button and very intrigued to say the least!
“Considering what he has been through, he doesn’t let it bother him. He is in an enclosure with four other chimps – Ronnie, Twmi, Fergus and female Nakima. He gets on well with them all and has a particular bond with Fergus. You often see them grooming each other which is a delight to see. Bili is truly remarkable.” q • For further information call 01639 730276, email info@ape-monkey-rescue.org.uk or visit the website www.ape-monkey-rescue.org.uk
