The team at an East Yorkshire holiday park have boosted one of the region’s leading medical research charities by handing over thousands of pounds raised by families from across the north during a summer of fundraising.
Patrington Haven Leisure Park adopted the Daisy Appeal as its annual charity early in the year and kickstarted the main campaign with a programme of fun activities over the Easter weekend.
Vicki Jackson, Emma Pickersgill and Sandra Quayle, who began co-ordinating charity campaigns at the park in 2022, then pushed on with a series of indoor and outdoor events geared to maximise engagement with visitors to the 480 holiday homes.
Donations poured in from a fun day in August which included a dog show, birds of prey, market stalls and a barbecue. A monthly lucky number draw raised hundreds of pounds and the park’s “Knit and Natter” group contributed £725 to the Daisy Appeal and the same amount to another charity from a sponsored walk.
Owners of Patrington Haven and colleagues within the 75-strong workforce also chipped in and helped to take the total to £6,500.
Vicki said:
As members of the entertainment team we have regular meetings with the owners and we all just kept coming up with new ideas. Knit and Natter raised a phenomenal amount of money for such a small group and other people just kept on giving.
This is our second year of fundraising and it all resulted from the three of us getting together over a glass of prosecco! It’s a year-round programme of events because we only close the holiday homes for one month a year and even then the leisure facilities are open 364 days a year.
We attract guests from the local area and along the M62 corridor and we build the fundraising into the fun programme during their stay here. We are so grateful to all of them – along with the owners and the staff here they are all part of the Patrington Haven family!
Since its foundation in 2002 the Daisy Appeal has raised more than £22m. The Daisy Appeal Medical Research Centre opened at Castle Hill Hospital, Cottingham, in 2008 and was followed, in 2014, by the opening of the Jack Brignall PET-CT Scanning Centre, housing the first in a new type of Siemens scanner in the country.
The latest addition to the facilities is a Molecular Imaging Research Centre (MIRC) which has been built at a cost of £8.8m and will improve accuracy and detection rates for people with cancer, heart disease and dementia in Hull, East Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire.
Claire Levy, Fundraiser for the Daisy Appeal, said:
We were really excited when the team at Patrington Haven chose us as their charity of the year and even though they have hundreds of guests every week we are amazed by how much they have raised.
They have shown what can be achieved by organising so many small events – who would have thought knitting and nattering could generate so much money?! We’re so grateful to Patrington Haven and to everybody who joined the fundraising events.
Charity of the year status is extremely important to us because it helps us work with our fundraising partners and plan our activities well ahead. We can provide all sorts of support for event organisers so we’d love to hear from anyone who would be interested in helping the Daisy Appeal.