At major concerts the
Brighton Orpheus Choir has often arranged for a collection to support local or national
charities, to which the audience and choir members have given generously. Here are some
recent examples. |
 Children in Need is the BBC's UK corporate charity, aiming to raise funds to help improve the lives of disadvantaged children and young people across the UK. Positive Destinations is a 3-year programme, additional to the Children in Need general grants programme, aimed at the most vulnerable children and young people. Fun and Friendship is a programme specifically targeted towards organisations working with disabled young people 12-18.. It aims to help create and enhance opportunities for disabled young people to meet friends, as independently as possible. See grants awarded in April 2009 for projects in our region - Sussex and Surrey. (PDF) |
The collection at the concert on 5 December 2009, was for Children in Need. The total donated was £520.70. | |
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
||
 |
Saving lives at sea The RNLI is the charity that provides a 24-hour lifesaving service around the UK and the Republic of Ireland. RNLI |
A collection for the Royal National Lifeboat Institute was made at the concert on 6 December 2008, raising £312.52. |
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
||
Solace
Ministries |
Solace Ministries was created as a Rwandan charitable organisation in July 1996. A small, dedicated group, themselves survivors of the genocide in 1994 which killed a million people and left thousands of widows and orphans with virtually no means of support, they were keenly aware of the need for solid Christian counselling to bring healing to their country. The help they needed encompassed not only material needs but emotional, spiritual and psychological needs. It was clear that these needs could only be met with a holistic approach, meeting both material as well as spiritual needs. Today Solace Ministries has expanded its remit to include households headed by children and dealing with the ever present HIV/AIDS pandemic. | A collection for the Studio
for Solace project in Rwanda was made on 10 December 2008 after a concert in
Southover Church, Lewes. £330.86 was raised to go towards this
project. Many of Africa’s leading musicians are denied the opportunity to record and share their music with the world. The project is to build a sound studio in Kigali, Rwanda. The aim is to enable Rwandan choirs and musicians to record and produce their own music and give vocational training opportunities to those who have suffered so much as a result of the Genocide. The studio will also be used to record some of Rwanda’s leading Gospel choirs. |
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
||
88 Old Street |
Shelter was founded in England in 1966 by the Reverend Bruce Kenrick, who had been horrified by the state of the tenements round his Notting Hill parish. The setting up of the organisation in Scotland followed in 1968. | Members of the Brighton Orpheus Choir were at Brighton Station on 18 December 2008 to serenade commuters returning from London with Christmas carols. The collection raised £267.35 from passing travellers. Doing the same during a very cold winter evening on 16 December 2009, thanks to the many travellers who donated while waiting for delayed trains, the collection totalled £286.29. |
| As slums
proliferated in the inner cities, homeless families were forced into overcrowded hostels,
and notorious landlords made the headlines. Kenrick saw the need for a national
campaigning body to complement the work of charities providing housing. Shelter was born. 1966 was also the year that Ken Loach's film about homelessness Cathy Come Home was first seen. Watched by 12 million people on its first broadcast, the film alerted the public, the media, and the government to the scale of the housing crisis, and Shelter gained many new supporters. Since Shelter's foundation, our country has undergone a long period of affluence and economic growth – but housing has been allowed to slip down the political agenda. The slums of the 1960s may be gone, but the housing crisis still exists. Today, there still seems an unbridgeable gulf between the housing haves and have-nots. Housing is now the key factor determining a person's health, well-being, and prospects in life. |
||
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________