The more I write about the charities and projects that Give a Book works with, the more I know that we chose the right charity to partner with. We were looking to give somewhere that our money would reach lots of different projects and if you head over to Give a Book's website and have a look at their projects page you'll see that they're always finding new projects to support!
We've talked about the charities they work with which help families, children, and people in prison, so today we wanted to focus on something a little different. Every two months Give a Book sends bags of books to Maggie's Centres around the country to supply their reading groups.
Maggie's Centres are set up on NHS grounds to help people with cancer, and their family and friends. They provide practical, emotional and social support for cancer patients and their facilities have been described as 'best practice', providing often much needed support in difficult times. The centres are welcoming places and all of the resources that they provide are completely free, from courses on stress management, talking to kids about cancer and returning to work after cancer, to creative writing and gardening groups. They are staffed by professionals who can answer any questions that visitors to the centres may have and have been designed to be relaxing spaces to be in .
Maggie's Centres were begun by Maggie Keswick Jencks, who lived with advanced cancer for two years. She and her husband believed that people should not "lose the joy of living in the fear of dying" and envisioned centres which would help to inform people and give them better strategies to cope with cancer. The first centre was opened in 1996, the year after Maggie died, and there are now centres all over the UK with many more in development.
There are a lot of ways you can get involved with this fantastic project. They run many fundraising events that you can join in with, including a Culture Crawl (which as founder and organiser of the annual London Bookshop Crawl I entirely support!), as well as which you can volunteer at your local centre, or you can donate directly to them in various different ways.
We are so happy that this is one of the charities which stands to benefit from money raised by our raffle! If you haven't got tickets yet please do check out the prizes and get some if you can.