Welcome to 2025!
Hello and welcome to 2025, a year that holds so much promise for A Shining Light.
Firstly, I’d like to start with an apology. I really wish we could do these updates more frequently, but it’s just so time consuming. When I started the charity little over two years ago, I had no idea what would happen. It’s a tremendous honour to do what we do and to be able to make a difference to the lives of so many people, but I probably never considered the impact on my own life too. Being a full-time teacher is a huge stress on its own, and running a charity alongside that often feels like a full-time job too. Whether it’s managing the money, going to the bank, organising events, running events, making phone calls or editing the website, there’s always something to do. So hopefully our social media content has been enough to keep you all in the loop with that’s going on, and it’s the easiest way for me to get things out there quickly – but I’ll certainly do my best to get more blog posts out there in 2025.
This does at least feel like a great time to kick things off now that 21 for 21 is officially go. Chris and his work colleagues set the ball rolling at the end of January, on a night that raised in excess of £5,000, and as I sit here today we’ve officially got 17 of our 21 events already locked in. Truth be told, I would expect us to now exceed that with more and more people wanting to join our cause, and we may well surpass our 2025 fundraising target of £21,000. But now is not the time to get carried away, and simply say instead that as always we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your ongoing support.
You can read more about those 17 events over on our events page. Outside of 21 for 21 we’ve been working hard with Teenage Cancer Trust to improve the facilities on their Yorkshire wards. Next month myself, Chris and Cassie will be taking over £2,000 worth of video games to Leeds to hopefully raise some spirits. The young people on the ward are currently sharing a very small handful of games between them, and that just didn’t sit right with us. We’ve also agreed to start funding a snack budget at the Leeds hospital – unfortunately their budget doesn’t stretch to cover the costs of food and drink for one of their weekly sessions, and so we’ve agreed to now fund that annually to ensure that service can continue.
One thing we’ve always been keen to do is provide our followers with tangible evidence of where their much needed donations actually end up, so we’re really looking forward to being able to share more regular updates from the hospitals with you in the near future.
More event details will of course follow too in addition to what is already on the events calendar. We’ve got posters and flyers for sports tournaments, galas, team challenge events and more still to come, so as always please keep an eye on our socials to see everything first.
I’ll end with some exciting news… You may have already seen that we have been shortlisted for Charity of the Year at this year’s Goole & Howdenshire Business Awards, an award which we took home back in 2023. It might just be sentiment, but the ceremony takes place on April 11, the same week as what would have been Luke’s 21st birthday, so let’s hope he’s looking down on us when the night comes around.
Keep shining everyone.
Ryan x