Fundraising and Ultra Challenges
I’m taking on a new challenge for 2024. I’m attempting to raise £7,000 and tackle 7 Ultra Challenges between now and September. Read on to find out what and why …
Ultra Challenge
Ultra Challenge deliver a range of long distance hikes (in my case, I believe some of them can be run if you wish), the longest one I’ll be doing is 106km round the coast of the Isle of Wight and which I will be hiking in one go.
In other words, whilst I will stop to eat and use the toilet, I will not be stopping to camp but instead continuing the route through the night.
I’ll be doing 4 of these roughly 100km distances, 2x 50km ones and to kick it all off I’ll be doing a 42km distance in London, in January.
And of course I’ll be doing A LOT of training KMs too!
Why? Why oh why am I doing this?
Well to put it bluntly I wanted to physically challenge myself, and I’ve been looking with friends at one day doing the Iron Man or other extreme challenges but that seems so way off in the future.
When I came across the Ultra Challenge it felt like both a challenge but also something achievable for me in the next year.
I got completely obsessed with the idea but I didn’t feel fully aligned with the charities they are partnered with. Don’t get me wrong, those charities are all worth while causes but nothing felt intrinsically right for me. So I decided to fundraise for my own causes.
I am raising money in part for Pregnant Then Screwed, a charity looking to:
fight discrimination for parents in the workplace,
improve policy surrounding the Early Years sector,
provide free legal access to women who need to take legal action against their employers.
Taken by me at the March of The Mummies (Oct 2022)
And I’m raising money for Pebbles Preschool and Daycare, the Early Year’s setting where I am Chairperson. Within our setting, and it seems across the country, we are seeing a rise in the number of special educational, behavioural, and physical needs cases and I want to raise the money to improve our offering in this area.
It is starting to become more well known that the Early Years sector faces massive underfunding which has a myriad of negative effects. It makes it hard to attract and retain staff as pay is not as high as within schools or other sectors, and it makes it difficult to keep nurseries in financially secure positions. We expect those looking after our children to be highly qualified (and rightly so) but many in the sector are earning minimum wage or just above to perform a high stress, high intensity role. You can understand why many consider, or are, leaving the industry.
Further to this, more social service roles are expected of early years staff as local government budgets are cut. This means that in cases where a child needs additional support, this has to be pushed forward and/or provided by the nursery staff, or such contractors as the nursery can afford. For instance we have to hire in a private speech and language therapist as NHS waiting times are too high. Finding the budget for this is incredibly difficult but it is necessary for these children and their families.
Taken by me at the March of The Mummies (Oct 2022)
And this is why I wanted to raise money for these two causes. I wanted not only to improve our setting for the children and families with those additional needs that we are seeing but also to help fund the valuable work that Pregnant Then Screwed are doing to tackle the underlying policy that makes our* jobs so difficult.
*Whilst I am not employed by the Early Years setting, the role of the committee, who are all voluntary, is vital and the setting cannot remain open without this team of volunteers to govern the setting. Some early years settings are run through schools, some are corporate but many, like ours, are committee run charities.What next?
For this introductory post, I’m going to leave it there on explaining my causes. Hopefully that has given you a taste for why I’m passionate about them but what is coming and how can you help?
The schedule of walks is:
42km in London at the end of January
50km in Windsor near Easter
106km around the Isle of Wight in May
100km in the Lake District in June
100km in the Peak District in July
50km along the South West Coast in August
100km along the South Coast in September
I’ll be documenting my training and my fundraising efforts the entire time and bringing you along on the journey with me virtually.
To donate you can use the Go Fund Me link, if you sign up to receive updates on there you will also see updates on how it’s going there. Other places you can follow along:
on this blog I’ll be sharing longer format content, more in depth posts about how it is all going and the reasons behind what I’m doing.
on Instagram I’ll be posting regular, quicker updates on what’s happening.
If you are on Strava you will be able to see my training hikes and also runs (because I’ve also started running it seems!).
If I can rope someone in to help me with editing, I might post some YouTube content on this too…
