Congratulations to Claire who raised £1400 in the Marathon!

On Sunday, Claire Newman ran her first marathon, and the GBHT received its first marathon fundraising! Two firsts. Claire wrote the following message to friends and there is still time to donate!

Hi,

I did it!!! On Sunday I joined 35,000 other people in London and ran my first marathon. It was an absolutely brilliant experience, with great weather, a great atmosphere and such tremendous support from the crowds.

I reached the starting line fuelled and watered to the max, with a lot of butterflies in my stomach. But … I ran the whole way, passed Peter Andre and Jordan in the second mile, kept a steady pace, didn’t hit the wall, felt quite smug passing everyone who had hit the wall, and finished with a time better than I was hoping for – 3hr 58min and 50sec.

Barely coherent on Sunday afternoon I was apparently walking around with a “what-just-happened-to-me?” expression on my face. But it was definitely worth it, as the adrenaline is still pumping two days later and the sense of accomplishment is immense.

All your support and good wishes really meant a lot to me and definitely helped in the final few miles. I have been extremely touched by your generosity. Thanks to you all I have now raised nearly £1,400* for the Gareth Butler History Trust enabling 14 students to go on history trips to the battlefields in Northern France this autumn. I’ll be meeting the students in a couple of months and it’ll be fantastic seeing all the money I have raised have such an immediate impact.

Thank you for your support.
Claire

PS any suggestions for getting down stairs without using quadricep muscles gratefully received!




* My justgiving site can still receive donations for a few more months so think £1400 may not be the final total.

Claire RAN the London Marathon on 26 April for the Gareth Butler History Trust.
If you would like to support her please visit www.justgiving.com/clairenewman26April

Please support Claire running the marathon for the GBHT!

My friend Claire Newman is running her first London Marathon on Sunday April 26th this year, and I am delighted that she has decided to do it to raise money for the Gareth Butler History Trust. If you are on Facebook and would like to read more about her challenge please click here. And you can sponsor her directly by going to JustGiving here. Her target is £1000 which would pay for around 10 young people to experience the brilliance of visiting the Northern France battlefields, and she's almost reached it, so please do donate!

I will be going to watch the London Marathon and hopefully spot Claire on her epic feat of human endeavour somewhere along the way. If you want to join me, drop me a line at jessica at jessicaasato.co.uk !

Schools competition - all expenses paid visit to Berlin

Dan Phillips who is involved with Their Past Your Future, has alerted me to a great new competition they are running to take 24 students to Berlin to learn about the roots and history of the Cold War. You can learn more here and having spoken to the TPYF team last year, I know it will be an unforgettable high quality experience.

JustGiving site is up!

My friend Ellie Levenson pointed out that our application to JustGiving has been registered, so... all of you who want to choose GBHT for your marathons or quizzes you can now do it very simply by going to http://www.justgiving.com/gbht

We're also working on the application form which should be available for schools to apply for funding soon. Watch this space...

Finally our charity number is confirmed!

The Charity Commission have finally confirmed the GBHT's charity status, and we have our magic registration number which is: 1126694.

Thanks to Erica Crump and Lawrie Simanowitz at Bates Wells and Braithwaite solicitors who have worked hard over the last few months to get us this status.

Now I just need to work out how to get Gift Aid up and running and then the Just Giving site...

Top DVD from Their Past Your Future

It has been far too long since I blogged, but I wanted to flag up a brilliant free DVD that the team at Their Past Your Future (TPYF) is sending to every primary and secondary school in November. TPYF is an education project led by a partnership of the Imperial War Museum and others, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet with them today to talk about the GBHT. They kindly gave me a copy of the DVD which is being sent to schools and I thought I should also provide a link to their additional learning resources here.

TPYF raised a number of issues which have given me lots to think about, and the main one is how to ensure that the Trust funds history trips which will end up giving young people a high quality educational experience rather than a jolly. As we don't intend to organise the trips ourselves, the GBHT will have to find ways of encouraging history teachers to plan trips which will get the most out of the places they are going to visit. There's a lot here that we can learn from TPYF who have run 38 trips over the past four and a half years, and one of the things I think we need to think carefully about is how teachers prepare themselves and their students for the trip and what outcomes they expect after they return.

A major issue does seem to be that many teachers do not feel adequately trained to lead history trips and TPYF have sought to remedy this by providing a learning programme called InSite. This is definitely an area which GBHT trustees need to think about for the future and it may be that as part of the funding grant we can fund training for those teachers who would benefit. Any thoughts from history teachers about what would be useful training for designing and leading history trips would be much appreciated.

The Abingdon Six cycle for the GBHT

When one of Gareth's old friends from Abingdon School days told me a group of them were thinking of cycling across Britain to raise money for the Trust I have to say I didn't think much would come of it. But ye of little faith! Last week six of them got together to cycle from Bristol to Edinburgh (five of them for the first part of the journey) and I went to wave them off on their intrepid journey. You can read their account here: http://sites.google.com/site/gbhtbikeride/ which shows just what fun it was. I will update the blog with the amount they raised when it's all in.