Hospice launches biggest ever fundraising campaign

This year, we launched our biggest ever fundraising campaign to completely rebuild the Day Services Unit.

Fundraising campaign

Hospice launches largest ever fundraising campaign

As you know, our Day Services Unit opened in 1991 to provide daily care to families in our community battling progressive, life-limiting illnesses.

Since then, we’ve seen a lot of faces pass through our doors, and we’re privileged to have helped some truly inspirational people as they fight their fight with a positivity and strength which just takes our breath away every day.

This unit is now 25 years old, and full to capacity every single day.

There are people and families in our community that need our help, and they need it 7-days a week.

So this year we launched our biggest ever fundraising campaign.

If we can raise the £3 million we need, then we can completely refurbish and expand our day unit so that we can help more families and stay open 7-days a week.

We’ll also be building brand new treatment rooms so that less of our patients have to go into hospital for procedures such as blood transfusions, as well as a live-in family apartment, which will enable the families of our patients to stay here when their loved ones need them the most.

This is a huge task, it will not be easy and it is going to require a combined effort from every single person in this Hospice family.

However, if we do it, and trust us – we will do it, then the impact will change lives forever.

Our wonderful Board of Trustees have already committed the first £1 million to achieving this vision, which means that we are tasked with raising the additional £2 million we need to make our dream a reality.

You may not even realise it, but you already make the most enormous difference here every day. Your support, your generosity and your love keeps the doors open, keeps us smiling and keeps our heads up on the tough days, and for that we are eternally gratefully.

You do so much for us, and we must turn to you now in our hour of need. We must turn to you, to help more families battling some of the toughest circumstances they will ever experience.

On behalf of everyone here at the Hospice, the families we support and the families we will be able to support as a result of your generosity, thank you for your love and for your continuing support.

John B. Woodall, Chairman of Mary Stevens Hospice Board of Trustees said;

“The services provided by Mary Stevens Hospice in Dudley Metropolitan Borough are unique and essential.  However, the 25-year-old Hospice building is now showing its age and urgently requires expansion and enhancement to meet growing future need. 

In 2014, Trustees committed over £1 million to improve the In-patient Unit services and we desperately need to modernise and transform the Day Services too.  We need to increase the number of patients for whom we can provide care and Trustees believe this is best done by increasing the capacity and capabilities of the Day Services Unit and improving our ability to provide education and training of others, such as Care Home and NHS staff, in palliative and end-of-life care.”

Stevan Jackson, CEO of Mary Stevens Hospice said;

“Since the hospice was opened 25 years ago, the number of Day Unit patient attendances has increased dramatically. In the last 10 years alone attendances have almost doubled, from 2,282 in 2005 to 4,244 in 2015 and many of our patients now have highly complex needs. We expect the numbers to continue rising and complexity of conditions to increase.

Trustees have calculated that the most effective way of coping with this ever-increasing demand on the Day Unit is to increase capacity by around 80% in the fullness of time, which would allow a further 3,692 patient attendances annually. The development work to achieve this future-proofing strategy will cost some £3 million (in addition to the £2.8 million needed annually).

Trustees have committed the first £1 million from the hospice’s resources and set us the goal of raising the remaining £2 million”. 

The redevelopment project has already received backing from a number of local organisations, one of which Is Lloyds Bank’s Black Country SME Team, who saw the front-page appeal in the Stourbridge News back in June and decided to throw their support behind the cause, picking us as their “Charity of the Year” for 2016, with a commitment to trying to raise as much money as possible towards the appeal.

Richard Jenkins, Area Director SME & Commercial Banking at Lloyds said:

“Lloyds Banking Group has committed to raising £22million through colleague and community fundraising for its charities of the year by 2020. As well as supporting the Group’s national charity partnership with BBC Children in Need, we are proud to be supporting the Mary Stevens Hospice with their £3m fund-raising campaign.

If you’d like to donate directly to this campaign, please do so through our GivePenny page which has been set up just for this appeal:
https://givepenny.com/msh-capital-appeal

You can be the difference. Thank you, as ever, for your incredible support.