Grace’s Place, our new children’s hospice in Bury, North Manchester, has taken a big step towards opening – we’ve just appointed our first member of staff there.
Grace’s Place, our new children’s hospice in Bury, North Manchester, has taken a big step towards opening – we’ve just appointed our first member of staff there.
Janet Baxendale is the retail project manager for Grace’s Place. She’ll be hunting down premises for a series of brand-new Forget Me Not charity shops in North Manchester, getting them ready for opening, and getting a team of staff and volunteers trained up and raring to go.
Our charity shops are an essential source of funding for us. For example, last year our 9 stores in West Yorkshire contributed 15% of the £4 million we needed to fund our children’s hospice in Huddersfield. So the shops in North Manchester will make a big difference to paying for care at Grace’s Place.
Initially, Janet will be looking for 3 sites to open Forget Me Not charity shops in Bury, Oldham and Rochdale. She knows the pressure is on: our goal is to have at least one, if not two, shops open by November!
We’ll be needing people to donate all sorts of goods – and people to come and buy them. We’ll be recruiting paid store managers, and we’ll need a fantastic team of volunteers (did you know that about a third of our volunteers then move into paid work with us?)
Grace’s Place expects to begin caring for children with life-shortening conditions through a Hospice at Home service before the end of 2017, and we hope it will be fully operational within a further year. Anyone who’d like to donate to the Kickstart Campaign can do so at here