Durham Freemasons' £7,500 boost for Sunderland charity More Than Grandparents
A Sunderland charity is getting a little help from its friends - oh yes it is!
Durham Freemasons have made a £7,500 donation to More Than Grandparents (MTGP), an organisation which provides support for kinship carers - grandparents, aunts and uncles or other family members looking after children whose parents are unable to do so.
The money will be split between two uses, with £2,500 going towards the cost of the charity’s annual pantomime, held at Millfield Community Centre, but in danger of failing this year due to lack of funds.
The remaining £5,000 will go towards the printing and posting of the group’s booklet ‘The Kinship Care Notebook’, designed to help teachers and affected children to explain what they are being looked after by family members.
The money will be used to print and post two copies of the book to the 568 Primary Schools in Sunderland, South Tyneside and County Durham, explaining why a child 'does not live with their parents and including useful information for kinship carers.
MTGP funder and CEO Mel Nichols visited the Masonic Lodge in Sunderland’s Queen Street to hold an advice seminar on talking to difficult children and accept the donation from Durham Masons’ deputy leader John Watts.
Mel was delighted that the donation would enable the charity to go ahead with its annual production: “Every year we do a pantomime with our families,” she said.
“The families get together and they write the pantomime themselves and share ideas. We have got a scriptwriter who puts the script together and we perform it to our local community, so we are looking for funding to help us pay for the scriptwriter, staffing costs and costumes.”
The booklets had been a response to cared for children: “Our children were telling us that their friends at school did not understand kinship care and were saying mean things to them.
“We decided a good way to address that would be to introduce a book into schools to educate the children about kinship care.”
John Watts said the Freemasons had been following the work of MTGP since giving organisation a £13,500 grant from national funds a few years ago: “An opportunity arose that one of our former members, Norman Jackson, passed away a few years ago and gave quite a significant legacy to us,” he said.
“More Than Grandparents is one of those causes that we were really attracted to, so we have now given them another £7,500 from that fund.”