May 2014
Children throughout St John’s have raised a tremendous £5,733.02 for local charity, Blue Smile since the Easter holidays and the total is still rising. Blue Smile is a Cambridgeshire children’s charity that provides counselling and therapy for pupils in schools between the ages of 3 and 13 during a critical window of opportunity for change. The donation was raised by the ‘Grow Your Money’ initiative.
The project was started at St John’s last year by Deputy Head, Mrs Ruth O’Sullivan, and was designed to encourage each child in Years 5 to 8 to discover and develop their entrepreneurial skills, by converting the £1 they were each given into more money for charity. Due to its success it has become a whole school project with some of our youngest children donning their baking aprons in the name of charity.
The children’s inspiring ideas included making home-made treats and holding bake sales, penalty shoot-outs, selling painted stones as paperweights and running car washes. A number of children used the money they had initially made in order to convert this into a larger amount in true entrepreneurial style. In the words of Mrs O’Sullivan, “The children at St John’s felt that Blue Smile was an important local children’s charity to support. It has been fantastic to be able to open this up to the whole school and some of our youngest have raised money too. The children have worked extremely hard to raise this substantial amount of money and I am hugely proud of all of them.”
Blue Smile provides the kind of specialist support in schools which gives a vulnerable child the expert and consistent care they need. They call on highly-trained paid and voluntary professionals to do this work and use school premises free of charge, so it is both a highly-skilled and cost-effective intervention. £1 spent on therapeutic support now can literally save £100s later on by avoiding the costs of mental health facilities or youth offending institutes.
Please visit the charity’s website for more details:
