Durham Freemasons' £7,500 grant to  present Sunderland charity More Than Grandparents - video Dailymotion

Sunderland Echo

The money, from the masons' Norman Jackson Fund will be used to support the charity's annual pantomime and distribution of its Kinship Care Notebook to schools across County Durham.

Transcript

00:00Mel Nichols is the CEO and founder of More Than Grandparents. What do you actually do?

00:06We support kinship carers, so that's relatives, grandparents, aunties, uncles who are raising a relative child

00:14but a majority of our kinship carers are grandparents raising their grandchildren

00:18because they can't live with their mums and dads for various reasons.

00:21And what are you going to be using this money for?

00:24Every year we do a pantomime with our families, so the families get together and they write the pantomime themselves

00:29and share ideas and then we've got a script writer who puts the script together

00:36and we perform it to our local community, so we're looking for funding to help us do that

00:41to help us pay for the script writer and staffing costs and costumes and stuff

00:46so we can perform this pantomime to the local community

00:49and it helps bring a little bit of money back to the charity as well.

00:52And I understand you've produced a booklet for schools?

00:54We have, we've produced a booklet about kinship care

00:58because our children were telling us that their friends at school didn't understand kinship care

01:02and were saying mean things to them

01:04so we decided that a good way to address that would be to introduce a book into schools

01:10to help educate the children about kinship care

01:13because it's not widely spoken about, adoption is spoken about, foster care is spoken about

01:17but kinship care isn't widely known

01:19so the idea is that we'll get those books into schools

01:22we've already got books into Sunderland schools

01:27so each Sunderland school has received two copies

01:30and the Freemasons charity have funded some more books

01:35so we're waiting for those to be printed and delivered

01:37and they will be delivered to Durham schools

01:39so each Durham school will receive two copies of the book as well.

01:45John Watts is the Deputy Head of Durham Freemasons

01:48How's the money been raised?

01:50Well a few years ago our national Masonic charity gave £13,500 to this particular organisation

01:58More Than Grandparents

02:00we've watched what they're doing

02:02and an opportunity arose that one of our members

02:05our former members, Norman Jackson

02:07passed away a few years ago

02:09gave quite a significant legacy to us

02:11so we have some extra funding available at the moment

02:14More Than Grandparents is one of those causes that we were really attracted to

02:20so we've now given them another £7,500 from that fund

02:24to enable us to supply these books around schools throughout County Durham

02:29and we really hope that the schools that receive them

02:32will enjoy them and get benefit from them.

Durham Freemasons' £7,500 grant to present Sunderland charity More Than Grandparents

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