We have finished our Winter Fundraiser! To everyone who has shared, engaged and donated these past 10 days, thank you so much. We appreciate all your support, and in this challenging year, knowing we have amazing champions like you in our communities has meant to much.
We’re pleased to announce that we have raised a fantastic £1857 during our Winter Fundraiser, including £1100 from organisational donations by DAC Beachcroft and Studio III. This money will allow us to continue investing in students, in our communities, and in the recovery of our Hub cities in rebuilding from the impact of the pandemic. We were aiming to raise £1000 from our campaign through individual donations, so any final donations you can give to Student Hubs during the festive season that will help us get even closer to our goal would be greatly appreciated.
What did we do?
We launched our campaign on #GivingTuesday across all of our Hubs, and this started a week full of events for us.
On Wednesday 2nd December, our local Hubs celebrated what we called our Super Satsuma Day. This was a day for students, whether they were packing to go home or wrapping up for the end of term, to get involved in our campaign. We asked them to donate just £1 through our new text donation campaign, which was very exciting for us as we have never run text donations as an organisation before! Following the success of the day, we even expanded our text donation offer so people could donate even more money in another accessible way.
On Thursday 3rd December, we embraced #ThrowbackThursday by running our new Alumni Ambassadors’ first event, our ticketed Christmas Quiz. The event was a great success, raising £85 for Student Hubs, and we got to see our alumni, Ambassadors and Hub supporters for an evening of quizzing and festive cheer.
Finally, on Friday 4th December we kicked off our Hub spotlights with Southampton Hub, and shared our recent donation by DAC Beachcroft of £1000 to our Branch Up programme.
Hub social issue spotlights
During our Winter Fundraiser, we thought it was important for our local Hubs to spotlight the issues which had affected their Hub communities during the pandemic, and share how we planned to tackle them across our Hub network.
On Friday, Southampton Hub spotlighted the issue of youth disadvantage. They asked their Hub alumni, Alice, to write a blog on the topic which you can find here.
On Monday, Cambridge Hub spotlighted the issue of social isolation and belonging. Their staff team posted a blog in which they featured what they were doing locally and across our Hub network to tackle these issues in our communities. You can find the blog here.
On Tuesday, Winchester Hub spotlighted the issue of community capacity. They also featured a blog in which they highlighted three programmes they deliver locally which have added capacity to their community at this challenging time, and how they were supporting the student community at Winchester. Read their blog here.
On Wednesday, Bristol Hub spotlighted the issue of educational attainment. This is an issue we feel passionate about at Student Hubs, and was the recent focus of our One Community Forum event for all five Hubs. Bristol Hub shared how they tackle this issue locally, through their introductory video with Schools Plus Coordinator, Tilly, and their Instagram posts.
Finally, our Kingston Hub wrapped up the week with spotlighting youth skills and development. Young people have been hugely impacted by the pandemic, and our Kingston Hub shared how they have been responding to this, with students sharing the impact their involvement in the Hub has had on their wellbeing, skills and experience during the pandemic. You can also read their students’ blog here.
Thank you
Thank you once again for supporting, sharing and donating to our campaign. Your donation will make a huge impact to our work for 2021, and we’re excited and grateful to be in a position where we can continue to support our students and communities through our programmes and capacity.
An additional thank you to DAC Beachcroft and to Studio III who donated £1100 to our Winter Fundraiser. Working with organisations that share our values, that care about younger people and older people in our communities, and who support the work we do is hugely important to us, and your donations make a large impact on the work Student Hubs does. You can read more about DAC Beachcroft’s donation here. If your organisation would like to fundraise or work in partnership with Student Hubs, you can get in touch with Fiona Walsh, Sales Director at fiona.walsh@www.studenthubs.org.
If you want to continue making an impact to Student Hubs, we would strongly encourage you to become a regular donor. We have a brilliant offer for regular donors, and we want to build a relationship with you. Regular donors mean we have a consistent stream of donations coming in that can support our programmes, our response as a network, and our national team to continue to grow, develop and innovate at Student Hubs. You can sign up to be a regular donor here by changing your ‘one-off’ donation to a weekly, monthly or quarterly donation to Student Hubs under the ‘donation type’ drop-down menu.
Our Winchester Hub student Harry sums it up perfectly below.
From all of us at Student Hubs, thank you, have a #HubbyHolidays and best wishes for 2021!