Wildflowers for Youth Talk

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We love the huge variety of ways that people raise money for Youth Talk. When we created our A-Z of Fundraising, it didn’t cross our minds that W could be for Wildflowers – in particular a sponsored search for them!

Margaret Thirlway has been invovled with Youth Talk from its inception and has been a Trustee for nearly 25 years. She has two daughters in their twenties, tells us “I am very aware of the stresses young people face and the crying need for early intervention to alleviate mental health difficulties.”

She combined her love of nature (linking brilliantly with the theme for Mental Health Awareness Week this year!) and supporting Youth Talk and challenged herself to find as many wildflowers as possible in her local area in 7 days.

wildflowers, fundraising, youth talk, st albans, counselling, anxiety, mental health, charity

The hunt

Over on her Instagram Margaret (@wildflowerhunter1) hoped to find between 30 and 50 flowers which she would share on her Instagram and for those who don’t use social media she added them to a private google album so that everyone could watch the hunt as it unfolded.

Margaret added a comment alongside each photograph identifying the flower and sharing many interesting facts. We weren’t expecting it to be so educational and beautiful from just wildflowers found within a 15 minute walk of her home.

By June 13^th she had found over 53 flowers and on the 17th June signed off her Instagram adventures with a total of 93 posts – including one of a visiting fox!

Making sponsorship easy

As our Half Marathon runners Sharon & Sienna found, setting up a fundraising page with Virgin Money Giving was really easy for Margaret. If you’d like to support her original and seasonal fundraiser and help Margaret reach her target (she’s really close but not quite there!), then please donate to the online fundraising page here: https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/MargaretThirlway.

At the time of writing her update reads;

Update 15th June: The hunt has ended, with 79 flowers found ; all uploaded to Dropbox but I still need to add some to Instagram. I’ve reached half my target so far, but some people offered to sponsor me per flower and have been waiting for the final count. It would be wonderful to get to my target or a bit over – if we could make it to £550 or £600, that would pretty much pay for a complete course of counselling for a young person (the average is around 11 or 12 sessions); alternatively it would provide 11 or 12 young people with an initial session which gives them hope that things can get better for them. Thank you so much for all the generous donations!

Thank you

The entire Youth Talk team would like to say thank you to Margaret for coming up with such an innovative and educational fundraiser. We’ve certainly learnt a lot about wildflowers as we’ve followed her progress and it’s made us really curious as to what we might find growing on our doorsteps. If you’d like to know the science about how getting out in nature can improve your wellbeing, this article from The 52 Project may be interesting!