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Businesses, volunteers and supporters have helped raise more than £27,000 for Julia’s House children’s hospice by collecting 1,935 Christmas trees from local homes.

Tree-mendous charity collection raises £27k for children’s hospice Julia’s House

Businesses, volunteers and supporters have helped raise more than £27,000 for Julia’s House children’s hospice by collecting 1,935 Christmas trees from local homes.

Hundreds of people living in Wiltshire and Dorset had their real trees collected and recycled from their doorstep by Julia’s House and made donations to help provide the charity’s lifeline of care for local families.

The Julia’s House fundraising team was supported by volunteers from a number of local businesses, including Jane James and Associates and Lexus Swindon, who sponsored the promotion of this year’s Christmas tree collection in Wiltshire.

The trees collected from the Devizes, Pewsey and Marlborough areas were then taken to The Old Potato Yard in Devizes and The Farm at Avebury, and recycled as chippings for use on local farmland.

In its fourth collection year, the charity picked up 605 Christmas trees in Wiltshire and a further 1330 trees in Dorset, raising £27,305 in total from donations.

That’s the equivalent of more than 27 weeks of respite care for a seriously ill child, enabling the rest of their family to have a much-needed break from caring around the clock.

The funds are a welcome support for Julia’s House children’s hospice, which recently announced it was facing a £1m budget deficit this year and feared services may need to be cut due to the rising costs of care.

Last year, it cost the charity around £5m to provide its critical and compassionate care for families of children living with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions. Just eight per cent of the charity’s costs are covered by ongoing government support – the rest is kindly donated by supporters.

Claudia Hazelton, community fundraiser for Julia’s House, said, “We’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who booked to have their tree collected by Julia’s House, and also to our hard working and committed volunteers from local businesses and organisations who provided vans, chippers and helping hands to get the job done – it was a real team effort and very rewarding!”

She added: “We’re thrilled to have raised these vital funds to support our care for local families, and we hope to make our charity tree collection even bigger and better next year.”

Julia’s House is Wiltshire’s local children’s hospice charity. The charity relies almost entirely on donations from the local community to fund its critical respite breaks and compassionate care for the county’s most seriously ill children and their families – in the Julia’s House hospice in Devizes and in families’ homes.

Pictured: Julia’s House fundraisers Alice Chalmers and Hannah Clinch. Image courtesy of Jon Bolton

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