Just keep spinning – Contact the Elderley

As part of our ongoing support for the charity,
Contact the Elderly, the Hireserve team have
been hard at work with a new fundraiser for 2018.

Take a look at what we’ve been up to…

The month of January is one that often evokes many different feelings for people.

It can bring motivation to join a gym, optimism to try dry-Jan, or the drive to look for a new job. But for the older generation it can bring an overwhelming sense of loneliness.

New data from Contact the Elderly suggests the loneliness epidemic is particularly acute in January, as the number of isolated older people who reach out for support increases dramatically after the festive period. In the past three years, enquiries increased by 86% between December and January.

Contact the Elderly organise free monthly Sunday tea parties for groups of older people who live alone. This provides them with regular interaction, vital friendship links and something to look forward to each month.

We’ve been supporting Contact the Elderly since June last year, and in August we held our first tea party here at the Hireserve office for our local Basingstoke group. There was such a wonderful buzz around the office with plenty of chat, laughter and cake! We were humbled by all the empty trays of scones and were so pleased with the feedback from our guests and volunteers.

It wasn’t long before we were already planning our next event, but this time we wanted to do something different to really push us.

We wanted to raise enough money to support our Contact the Elderly Group for a year. To do that we would need £700…but how would we do it?

Many options were thrown into the mix, from doing a sponsored run to a mass baking sale, but eventually we realised the most obvious option as staring us right in the face…Cycle to Paris.

We do have one keen cyclist in the Hireserve team, but to send him off on his own on a 400km ride to Paris didn’t seem very fair on the rest of us. So, we used our ingenuity and brought in a spin bike from our local gym, an odometer to measure the distance and a fan to simulate the wind rushing through our hair.

Throughout the week the entire Hireserve team participated to reach our goal, possibly due to an eagerness to work off any lingering Christmas pounds. This meant we smashed our target of 400km with time to spare, we were almost halfway back to the UK by the end of the week!

A combination of donations to our Virgin Money Giving page and generous offerings from our Hireserve team has taken our running total to £550. We’re delighted with the generosity and commitment to reaching our goal of £700, and we will continue to hold fundraising events throughout the year