EIGHT employees from The Spencer Group (Spencer) are gearing up to take on The Three Peaks Challenge to raise money for Railway Children.
The Spencer team will take on the challenge in June and is looking to raise more than £10,000 for the charity.
Standing at a combined height of more than 3,400m, the team will scale Snowden, Scafell Pike and Ben Nevis in 24hours, traveling to the foot of each climb by rail.
Richard Caley from Spencer, said: “This is a challenge for the eight of us befitting the size of the task facing Railway Children on a day-to-day basis. We spent some time thinking of ways in which we could make the challenge unique and the idea of travelling between each peak by rail was a popular suggestion. After all, we are an engineering group operating predominantly in the rail industry.”
In addition to The Three Peaks Challenge, Spencer is holding a charity ball on May 29 at the KC Stadium – home of Hull City AFC.
The event will be attended by leading business people from across the region as well as a number of Spencer’s partners and supply chain.
The event will feature a casino, magician and auction for a plethora of sporting and signed celebrity merchandise.
Attendees will also be entertained with music from The Ordinary Men.
Richard and his wife, Sarah, became parents to their first child, Felicity, in December last year and it was the realisation of the privileged world Felicity was born into that led him to choosing to support the work Railway Children does.
“Felicity has been born into a wide-reaching community of family and friends that will love her and support her, and she has access to baby and child support facilities such as baby signing, baby massage and toy libraries on her doorstep,” he said.
“She will soon be receiving her first set of injections at the doctor’s surgery; no doubt she’ll be revisiting the same surgery many times in years to come and most likely other NHS services (but hopefully not too many) as she gets older.
“Not all children will receive the same love, care and opportunities as Felicity and the sad truth is that some will actually know only suffering and hardship. Railway Children is a fantastic charity doing work to try and prevent that and we are delighted to be able to support it.”
Railway Children supports children in the UK, India and Africa, providing protection and opportunity for children with nowhere else to go and nobody to turn to. Their focus is to get to children who have run away or been forced from their homes as soon as possible before the grim reality of living on the streets takes hold and they become vulnerable to poverty, violence, abuse and neglect.
More than 100,000 children run away from home in the UK each year.
In 2013-14, Railway Children asked 216 local authorities how many times they had used emergency accommodation to help a young person under 16 who had gone missing from home or care.
Out of the 210 that replied, only 110 could tell the charity how often they had used emergency accommodation in this way in 2013-14. In 71 cases, the answer was never.
Visit http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/team/DavidMcLoughlin1 to support Richard and the team by donating to Railway Children.
You can also keep up-to-date with all the latest news ahead of the charity ball, like the event’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Spencer-Charity-Ball and follow @SpencerBall2015 on Twitter.
To buy a ticket for the Charity Ball, please visit: http://www.spencercharityball.co.uk.
