Posts  >  Category: Charity

We were contacted by Louise Meek and Abigail Bannatyne, who had decided to take on this year's Bristol Half Marathon and as a local Bristol company we offered to sponsor the girls! Lou (right) and Abi have been training hard for months and as the race day is nearly here we thought we introduce our two crazy brave runners!

Lou and Abi have chosen to raise money for 3 charities close to them, Make A Wish, Lupus Research and BRACE - you can read a bit about each of the charities and the work they do below:Make-A-Wish Foundation UK grants magical wishes to children and young people fighting life-threatening illnesses. The charity was founded in the UK in 1986 and since then we have granted over 6,500 magical wishes to children and young people aged between three and seventeen years old. There are over 20,000 children in the UK living with a life-threatening illness and we believe that every one of them deserves to experience the magic of a Make-A-Wish wish. Anyone can refer a child to us. This year alone, around 1,200 children will turn to Make-A-Wish to have their special wish granted. A small and dedicated team of professional wishgranters works alongside hundreds of volunteers to turn our children’s wishes into reality. Whether a wish is to be a princess or a train driver for the day, own the latest TV or computer equipment, meet a favourite celebrity or just enjoy some special time away from home with their family, a wish come true brings so much to a child’s life and provides memories that last a lifetime for the whole family.

Make A Wish is an amazing charity that gives children with terminal illnesses one last wish in their life from meeting JLS to going to Disneyland... This is such a great cause and very close to Abi's heart.

LUPUS UK is the only National Registered Charity supporting people with Lupus. Lupus is a chronic incurable autoimmune disease that can affect the joints and almost every major organ in the body, including the heart, kidneys, skin, lungs, and brain. With Lupus, the immune system, which is designed to protect against infection, mistakenly attacks the body’s own tissues and organs causing inflammation and damage in the joints, muscles and organs.

One of Lou's closest friends has this illness, and she is a true inspiration. Lupus needs so much more research and injections of cash and we are proud to be raising some much needed funds for them.

BRACE raises money to fund research into Alzheimers and other dementias. It's about hope - the hope, based on solid science, that we will understand, control and finally beat dementia. Dementia is a physical illness of the brain, but the human experience of it is loss of memory and ability to cope, destruction of personality and loss of relationship. It is more common than is generally realised, affecting 1 in 50 people aged 65-70 and as many as 1 in 5 over 80. In rare cases, it can strike young adults and even children. It is truly a profound form of suffering. That is why a charity that provides hope is essential. BRACE is a West Country charity, based in Bristol and currently funding scientists in the same region. However, dementia is a problem for the whole human race and the benefits of the research are therefore global.

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Two weeks ago, eight of us TruffleShufflers took a day out from our desk jobs to take part in an Apprentice style "Director's Challenge" for the lovely one25 charity. The aim of the day was to work through a list of challenges in order to raise as much money as humanly possible in an eight hour day for the charity, which aims to support street sex workers in changing their lives for the better - by giving up this street work, finding new jobs, new homes and ridding themselves of addictions. One25 provides an outreach van which engages street workers at night on the streets of Bristol, providing advice, support and all the details they need to feel welcome at the charity's drop-in centre. At the drop in centre, the women are welcome to come for a cuppa, do their laundry, meet counsellors, doctors and addiction specialists - with the ultimate aim of giving them the best possible chance to step away from the streets into a safer, healthier life.

Our Director's Challenges were as follows:

1. Recruit as many people as we could to run the Bristol Half Marathon or perform a sponsored SkyDive in aid of the charity. Each of these people would have to raise a minimum of £200 for one25 and that amount would go down on our scorecards.

2. Sell as many cake cook books as we could for £5 each.

3. Gather donated prizes for one25 to sell at their charity auction in November.

4. Collect corporate donations to the charity, trying our hardest to secure £125 from each generous donor.

5. Persuade people to text smaller donations to a special text number setup for the day.

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Here are TruffleShuffle.com we are often asked to help out with various charity organisations and fundraising events and while we would love to be able to help everyone it is not always possible and so we like to select a couple of requests each month, that we feel we are able to assist in some way.

Recently we received an email from Callum Reece, Radio Presenter and Voiceover Artist, who contributes a lot of his time to different charity causes, helping to raise as much awareness and of course money, as possible. Having read about the latest charity Callum has chosen to support we wanted to contribute to all the fab efforts so far.

Callum has pledged his support to the Charlie Hook Appeal. Charlie is a 6 year old boy with an aggressive form of cancer and as part of the Charlie Hook Appeal, Callum is trying to help raise £300,000 for potentially life saving treatment abroad for 6 year old Charlie.

Please read on to hear from Charlie’s Mum Nicola and to see how you can help Charlie’s Appeal:

"On the 10th January 2011, on his 5th birthday, my beautiful son Charlie was diagnosed with high risk, stage 4 Neuroblastoma. An aggressive and difficult to treat childhood cancer. I can not describe the shock and shear devastation. He has had to endure months of intensive and invasive tests, chemotherapy, surgery and will shortly begin radiotherapy and immunotherapy. I am literally watching my once lively, happy, cheeky and outgoing baby go through hell and back in hope that he gets better. This is a living nightmare. Charlie is a fighter and tries so hard to keep a smile on his face because he knows this will make his mummy smile too. He has so far responded well to treatment but there is a very high relapse rate. The UK has no relapse protocol. In this event, I refuse to be told there is nothing more that can be done, I simply will not accept this. Its my job as his mummy to go to the ends of the earth and back to save him.

Unfortunately this comes at a price, a 6 figure price for treatment abroad. Charlie needs to be able to have instant access to money to pay for treatment that the UK cannot offer. It is impossible to predict if, how, or where Charlie could relapse, but the fact is that he does stand a terribly high chance of suffering some sort of relapse within the next 5 years, with most relapsing within the first 2 years. Treatments range in price from around £150,000, though should Charlie relapse in the brain, something that is happening more and more, we would need to be ready with a deposit of around £300,000 for live saving treatment in America.

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March has been a very special month, with lots of new brands and collections being launched on the site. Just as the sun is starting to show it's face and coming out from behind the clouds, we sure are ready to boost our tee collections in preparation for the Summer months!

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Out Of Print

If you consider yourself a bookish type, avert your eyes from your gripping read and peer over your sexy specs at this fabulous new collection. Out of Print celebrates the world's great stories through fashion. Their tees feature iconic and often out of print book covers. Some are classics, some are just curious enough to make great t-shirts, but all are striking works of art! Featuring cult titles such as Pride And Prejudice, Catch 22, The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights. In addition to spreading the joy of reading on their fab tees, Out Of Print acknowledge that many parts of the world don't have access to books at all, so for each product sold, one book is donated to a community in need through their partner Books For Africa. Such and delightful and heart warming mission and stunning tees too!

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Yes, you read it right! Back to the Future's III's iconic DeLorean is part of the upcoming Profiles in History auction and this awesome piece of movie history is expected to fetch a whopping $600,000 when it goes under the hammer in December!

One of only three of the seven DeLoreans used in the trilogy to survive, it was of course fitted with a flux capacitor and fuelled by plutonium,  ready to travel through time when it reached a speed of 88mph.

For fans with slightly less cash to burn, the legendary hoverboard, which featured in Back to the Future Part II, is also on sale and estimated to fetch up to $20,000 (£12,800!)  Marty's jacket and the shirt worn by his legendary mentor, Doc Brown are also up for grabs.

The auction is being held to raise money for Michael J Fox's Foundation for Parkinson's Research, Fox who played Marty Mc Fly in the awesome movie trilogy went public with his own battle with Parkinson's in 1998 after he was diagnosed seven years previously.

The auction, which will include other items of film memorabilia including a pair of Wizard of Oz ruby slippers, will take place December 15 to 17 so if you're prepared to dig pretty damn deep, keep your eye on the auction site here as more details will be revealed soon.

If however (like us,) these amazing pieces of movie memorabilia are sadly out of reach, never fear! Luckily, you can get your very own little piece of Back To The Future for just £5.99 right here on TruffleShuffle.com!

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A few weeks ago, TruffleShuffle was contacted by the Bristol based charity, One25.

A small charity with big ambitions, their mission is to reach out to women trapped in street sex work, supporting them to break free and build new lives away from violence, poverty and addiction. One25 gives them the intensive support needed to step away from the streets: whether for crisis support with the help of their night van, an afternoon at their drop-in centre, or permanently with the help of one-to-one caseworkers and their new mother and baby home, Naomi House.

In order to continue their amazing work and help more vulnerable women and their families, One25 are running a brilliant fundraising campaign called 'Give it up for One25'... - a challenge for people to give something up for 125 hours OR 125 days from 4th November 2011 or 3rd March 2012 in return for sponsorship or donations to this amazing charity.

To help promote the campaign, they asked us whether we would help them to design and make their campaign tee which we were honoured to do! Our designer James worked with the One25 team to create a range of designs based round the charities logo and the 'Give It Up' theme. The charities facebook fans then chose their favourite and plumped for this design (good choice guys!)

As well as designing the tee, the TruffleShuffle team will all be doing their best to give something up (hair straighteners, coffee, moaning and chocolate are some of the things we'll be sacrificing!) in order to help raise much needed funds for the charity! Our favourite though is One25 fundraiser Lu Willott who is giving up NOT wearing our campaign t-shirt! Yes, she'll be wearing it wherever she goes for four months, even on Christmas day and at a black-tie dinner! Good on you girl.

Anyone can take part in this fundraising event so if you guys fancy doing your bit and helping One25 reach out to even more women in need......

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