Fundraising piece by piece

I have been fundraising for my London Marathon place for the past three years and it has been a bit of a learning experience! Covid-19 blew my original plans for both running and fundraising out of the water and I needed to have a rethink. Big fundraising events were out of the question, the businesses that I hoped to approach were struggling with the effects of lockdown and I needed to get really creative.

I love making things and always have done, but how could I use that for fundraising? I was also part of the amazing social network community of runners training for the London Marathon. One of the things that I had noticed was that most of the races that I had entered gave a t-shirt along with the finisher’s medal. I had started to get quite a collection of these t-shirts, most of which I would struggle to find the time to wear. I was reluctant to use them as dusters or recycle them, they held memories and represented personal victories. If that was true for me, it would probably be the case for lots of other runners and so I decided to make a quilt out of race t-shirts as a sample.

I was really proud of what I had created and shared pictures of my sample quilt in the marathon runners groups on Facebook. I explained that this would support my fundraising, had a few enquiries and things snowballed from there. I usually have at least one quilt in progress and sometimes have a queue of t-shirts waiting to be cut up and pieced back together.

So what have I learned from this experience? First of all, it is important that I enjoy my fundraising and using my creativity makes this a fun process rather than a slog. I also learned that doing something that keeps generating donations month on month has made this so much easier. The regular orders bring in regular donations and it can be really surprising how quickly they add up.

I appreciate that sewing quilts may not be a set of skills that every other runner has but we all have something that we love to do. It really is worth thinking outside of the box and trying to come up with a way that you can use your passions to support your fundraising. You can also do what I did and tap into your networks on social media to find an audience who will support you.

This approach really does work, so far I have raised nearly £6,000.00 for Mencap and have more quilts waiting to be made. By the way, if you have a load of t-shirts that you don’t know what to do with, give me a shout!!