Fund Raising Progress
You’ll be pleased to know that we’re getting closer to our target to replace our community trip boat Kitty with a fully electric boat but there’s still a good way to go.
Thanks to your generosity and a lot of hard work from volunteers, we’ve raised over £50,000 from:
- Crowdfunding last December
- Our art auction at The Lightbox in February
- Corporate contributions from Waitrose, The Ion Group and SC Johnson
- Grants from The Syder Foundation and The Shanley Foundation and from Will Forster on behalf of Surrey County Council
- Generous legacies left by Joyce Keep and Peter Harman
- A host of individual donations
Boat Building
A lot of effort has gone into specifying the new boat and getting estimates for building it, made difficult by the high degree of instability in the UK boat building industry over the last two years. With commodity prices, particularly steel and timber moving almost week to week, obtaining fixed price quotes has been extremely difficult.
Our other challenge has been in providing a power supply to the canal side which has involved tracing land ownership and obtaining permissions – not a simple job!
However, we are making good progress and with more fund-raising activities underway, including further grant applications were optimistic that we can have the new Kitty in the water before the end of next year.
How can you help?
We’re aiming to raise £10,000 through a second round of Crowdfunding to help get us over the line. The Crowdfunder is live now will run until Christmas day. Click here if you would like to make a donation.
Buy a unique Christmas present. We are auctioning the entire collection of Nancy Larcombe canal paintings, left to the Basingstoke Canal Authority when she died. This is a unique opportunity to buy an original artwork. The auction finishes on Friday 16th December at 9pm and interest is high, so bid now before they all go!
We’d like to get more corporate donations. Even if you’re a small company a donation of as little as £100 would be welcome (and will cost you less than that given charity donations are tax deductible). Make a corporate donation here.
Use Easy Fund Raising when you buy almost anything online. Easy Fund Raising take a commission from each online company and pay half of that to us. It costs you nothing.
Use Amazon Smile if you’re shopping on Amazon. Amazon make a small donation to us every time you buy something using Amazon Smile. Once again, it costs you nothing to donate.
So, many thanks for all of your efforts and generosity so far, with a bit more of a push we can get the new electric Kitty up and running by this time next year.