Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust launched its Surgical Robot Appeal back in April 2021. We have now almost reached our £1.5m target with just £151,950 to go! We are calling all our supporters to please help us over the finish line. What could YOU do to support your hospital?
How you can help
You don’t have to be a marathon runner or a member of the Tour de France cycling team to join in with our robot fundraising. We’ve had people taking on all sorts of challenges for us including holding toy sales, learning Welsh for 1000 hours, and even selling cakes out of a canoe to raise funds! What could YOU do?
Here are 10 fundraising ideas:
- Host a dinner party. This could be as simple or elaborate as you like. Invite your friends over for a home-cooked meal. Ask guests to donate what they’d spend on eating out to the Robot Appeal.
- Staying on the foodie theme, get a group of friends together and create your own version of Come Dine With Me. Take it in turns to create your best dishes, then rate each other’s meals and compete for the title of ‘host with the most.’
- Donate your birthday. Instead of asking for gifts, ask your friends and family to give a donation instead. Facebook makes it super easy for you to use your birthday to raise money for a cause that’s important to you.
- Put your creativity to good use and get crafty. If you’re great at creating all things homemade and can knit, sew, paint, build or make jam, why not sell your wares?
- If music’s more your thing and you’re feeling ambitious, you could organise a mini-concert, recital or jamming session and sell tickets to your music-loving friends.
- Hold a dress down day at work in return for a donation, or why not give Metal Mickey a run for his money and dress up as a robot?
- A quiz is always good fun. You could hold a quotes quiz by collecting lots of movie quotes and song lyrics – then test your workmates. For a price, of course. And perhaps a prize.
- Show off your best bakes. Cake sales always go down well in the workplace, at school and, well anywhere really.
- Guess the number of sweets in a jar, peas in a bag, footballs in a car etc. The list is endless!
- Give a good old-fashioned donation at helpyourhospital.co.uk/robot
Ways some of our fundraisers have risen to the challenge
1000 challengers:
- It costs about £1,000 per patient to provide robot-assisted surgery and we launched our 1000 challenge to see how creative our supporters could get! We were delighted to receive details of many different types of challenges from 82-year-old Dot who aimed to walk 10,000 steps a day and ended up averaging 14,000 steps a day, to Jan who knitted and crafted 1000 wonderful creations in 1000 minutes and spent 1000 minutes learning Welsh, in honour of her Welsh transplant donor.
- Personal Trainer Tariq Mansell challenged himself to 1000 minutes of exercise in his gym after a close friend needed brain surgery to remove a tumour. He raised £3,460 for the surgical robot.
Sporting challenges:
- Eight-year-old Isla who has a rare genetic condition embarked on an epic 46-mile trike challenge to raise money for Addenbrooke’s. Inspired by learning about Egypt at school, she travelled the equivalent 46 miles it would take to trike through the city of Cairo to the pyramids of Giza, raising more than an incredible £10,000 in the process.
- At the beginning of lockdown, football fan Imogen (then aged 10) set the challenge of completing 7.1 million keepie uppies, one for every key worker in the country. She smashed her target and ended up raising an incredible £20,000 for several charities including ACT.
- CUH surgeon Atanu Pal ran the virtual London Marathon spelling out the word ‘Robot’ with his route.
- During Social Action Week from 6 – 10 June, students from Hills Road Sixth Form College took on several challenges to raise funds for the hospital. One group held a bake sale out of a canoe! They canoed about eight miles all the way from Stourbridge common to Grantchester, selling their homemade baked goods along the way.
If you would like to fundraise to help us reach our Robot Appeal target, please email fundraising@act4addenbrookes.org.uk to let us know your plans. You can find out more or donate at helpyourhospital.co.uk/robot
