We have some exciting news to share with you!
We have a new name and logo for our school’s work:
GCMT will stay as our official charity name but our day to day work will now be called LightSpace. In addition to the new name we have been working hard on a website that will showcase what we are doing and hopefully help us to be more successful in our funding efforts. The address is www.lightspace.org.uk. Keep checking back to see it develop in the next couple of weeks.
Other News:
Three of our Trustees (Jess, David and I) did a 13 miles sponsored walk in October – it may have been 13 miles but with the depth of mud we walked through it felt like 20 miles!! Currently we have raised over £700 with more
to come plus Gift Aid on top of that so we hope to top £1000. Thank you to everyone who sponsored us – the donation button is still live for those who never got chance.
Open the Book (OtB)
Open the Book (OtB) – we told you a bit about OtB in our last newsletter and how we want to recruit volunteers to deliver this wonderful resource in the schools in Grantham.
Thank-you so much to the schools who have expressed an interest to have us attend. The process for this is robust and as a trust we are working with Open the Book to make sure our volunteers are trained well, the props we use will also be of excellent quality and we will make sure our volunteers are appropriately trained for primary aged children and with all the necessary safeguarding training and checks in place. Because of this we now envisage not being able to offer it into schools until September 2020.
We will keep you up to date on our progress. Each of you who have expressed an interest will be registered to Open the Book with a team of volunteers, Jennie will be coming to get some forms filled in with you in the January term.
Sorry for the delay but we want to ensure the volunteer training and standard is a high quality as you would expect from us.
Prayer Spaces in Schools As we mentioned previously Prayer spaces are happening in schools all over the country.
Thank-you to the schools who wish to proceed with a prayer space as part of the school’s life. Each school will need to register to be a prayer space. Jennie will be bringing the form with her to see you, to think about your theme and discuss dates for us to come and set this up in your school.
We are currently putting our policies into place to ensure we can safely manage a team of volunteers. We will shortly be ready to take applications and then will run a full training and safeguarding programme from January.
How can you help us?
Thank you for the impact statements we have received. They have blessed us in our work. If you haven’t yet sent us one we would love to receive one from you to help us develop our future work and adjust programmes to suit your needs. They will also provide us with supportive evidence to apply for funding. Please can you write us an impact statement – tell us in a short paragraph how Jennie and the work of the trust has impacted the lives of your pupils and your school over the last year?
Conclusion
Thank you to everyone who is supporting us and allowing us to work with you in your schools. Please contact me if you want to discuss anything directly. We look forward to working with you in this busy Christmas term.