Celebrating the First-Ever Giving Day
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Melanie Bushell, Development Director & Georgia Radford, Teacher of Learning Support
ince the launch of The William Smith Fund in 2015, the support of many hundreds of donors has helped the school increase the proportion of Senior School pupils receiving some level of fee assistance from 1 in 9 to 1 in 7. The school has an ambitious long-term target of supporting 1 in 4 pupils. To achieve that amazing goal, it will be necessary to get the whole school behind the cause and that is how the idea of running PGS’s first Giving Day came about.Very new to UK schools, Giving Days are time-limited (2436 hours) digitally driven fundraising and engagement campaigns which rally a school’s whole community behind a particular cause. Campaigns like Children in Need and Comic Relief are very similar to Giving Days, with their focus on a particular cause on a particular date. Our first major success was to find a donor willing to match a proportion of the donations, so that the first gifts received on the Giving Day would be worth double. The Calleva Foundation, which is run by Stephen Butt OP and his wife Caroline, very generously stepped forward to pledge up to £100,000 of support – a spectacular sum. Up to £80,000 of this would match donations pound for pound and the other £20,000 was set aside to support specific pupil and fundraising challenges.
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This enormously generous pledge spurred us on to make our first Giving Day the very best it could be. We selected a 36-hour period from 8 a.m. on Wednesday 10th March 2021 through to 8 p.m. on Thursday 11th, not knowing at the time that this would end up being the middle of the first week back on the school site for everyone after the second full national lockdown. This turned the whole event into a massive celebration of the school community coming back together. The overall theme of #BeTheDifference was chosen to reflect both the difference that a bursary can make to a young person, and the difference that PGS, its staff and pupils can make to the communities in and around Portsmouth. We also wanted to highlight 1732, the school’s foundation year. While the Development Office set about gathering the stories of current and former pupils whose lives had been changed through receiving a bursary to attend PGS, and planning the fundraising messaging, Mrs Radford was asked by Dr Cotton to design some fun and thought-provoking challenges for Senior School pupils. In the Junior School, Mrs Evans planned a series of activities for the pupils which would add up to 1732, while Mr Ashcroft and Mrs Millward quietly hatched their own astonishing plan …..
THE PORTMUTHIAN 2020-21
