The story of the EACH #treehouseappeal

One of my son’s favourite books at the moment is Tiddler: the story-telling fish. It tells the story of a fish who is always late for school and comes up with the most amazing tall story excuses for being late. Most people don’t believe him but one fish shares his stories and they become folklore. As a result when he does finally get lost, all the fish that have shared his stories link together to help him find his way back home. Now isn’t that the power of networking!

People love a good story and they pass it on, and when they do they pass you on with it. You don’t have to prove yourself, you’re simply telling the story. So it is with the TreeHouse Appeal, what a great story to be part of.

Four years ago the architects I work for were approached by a charity, East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices, who run three children’s hospices in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. The Ipswich hospice is a tiny bungalow from where EACH staff support over 80 families all over Suffolk and North Essex. They help families deal with the crippling effects of having a life-endangered child, they provide respite care, giving the children an amazing fun-filled break away from home, and if as sometimes happens a child dies they support the family, including the other children, for many years afterwards.

EACH had decided they needed a larger, better building. They estimate that over 400 families in Suffolk and North Essex need their help, so they wanted to build a new hospice. And so the journey began.

A mystery benefactor gave them a wooded site within the county town of Ipswich, and incredibly it was possible to get the local authority to support the building of a hospice on the site. A need was clearly demonstrated. We were able to design a building which would thread between the mature trees, and we’d be able to build it without damaging the ecology of the woodland. Planning permission was finally granted at in 2009 and the charity had the basis to begin fundraising to pay for the building.

The majority of the cost needs to be raised directly from the general public, and three weeks ago EACH launched their fundraising appeal. The local paper, The East Anglian Daily Times and local radio station BBC Suffolk got behind the appeal and have asked everyone to do their bit. I knew that the appeal was about to be launched, but I didn’t know that the charity, which has a twitter account, was to set up a new twitter account just for the treehouse appeal, until Rachel who runs it began following me on twitter.

Twitter being how it is, within a day she had 50 follwers and now has over a hundred. More importantly, a band of friends has helped spread news about the appeal with the #treehouseappeal hashtag, by sharing the facebook updates and setting up a posterous site, all linking back to the donate page.

By the end of the first week we had Philip Ross from Safehinge in Glasgow donating the proceeds of his Great North Swim and appearing on MBBC Radio Suffolk, we had Hannah Coleman of Dreamwalls donating the proceeds of her marathon run in October, and we had Paul Weston (you know, that one who was on BBC Essex Dave Monk Show and appeared in the Daily Mirror and the Sun on Friday (no really!) raising money with a ‘Who is Paul Weston?” T-shirt and donating a cut of his media income.

Last week I went on site for the groundbreaking ceremony, to watch the augered piles being dug and to hear the latest total. Just three weeks after launching the appeal, they have raised over £160,000.

So well done everyone. It’s a lot of money but there is still a long way to go. So if you’d like to help these fabulous people do their brilliant work for more life endangered children and their families, step right up to the EACH Treehouse Appeal. You’ll be glad you did!

Su