Thank you to everyone who made this year possible!
A special thanks first to Quality Food Centre, Lew 1 Shipping, Tropical Shipping and Caicos Express Airways!
We have had one busy year! We started off with a sold-out brunch at Kalooki’s for 250 people raising over $18,000 (thanks to the supporters, KB Homes and Gilley’s Enterprises). It was a good start and it just got better.
We completed our first school year providing free breakfast every day to the primary school children at the government schools in North Caicos, Middle Caicos, South Caicos and Salt Cay. We celebrated with another sold out event for 100 supporters hosted free of charge by Bella Luna Pizza Garden, raising over $8,700.
After such success with the Breakfast Programme we decided to expand and introduce our Food Bank Programme – which puts non-perishable breakfast items in the remaining 10 government schools. We subsidise the Food Bank Programme to ensure 10 children have breakfast and we call on the public for food donations so that we can reach more children in those schools. As many as 20% of children at some schools are going to school without breakfast and there are over 4,000 children in our government schools.
The Islands were then hit by category 5 Hurricane Irma followed by category 3 Hurricane Maria two weeks later. Our schools were compromised for a long time, and some still are. We had to amend our Programmes to make sure those without kitchen facilities received ready to eat breakfast, which is a lot more expensive, and to increase the Food Bank Programme to subsidise 20 breakfasts at each school. We managed to raise over $22,600 from our amazing supporters for hurricane relief efforts. Our corporate sponsors Sotheby’s and Turkberry allowed us to use their donations towards hurricane relief and the general public were extremely generous donating relief items to our food banks. The International School of the Turks & Caicos and British West Indies Collegiate held food drives for us as well. We were able to order 450 bottles of ready to use formula, 8,700 granola bars, 8,700 fruit cups and 8,700 individual milk cartons.
After a turbulent couple of months following the hurricanes, we hosted an 80’s dance party a Chopsticks for our supporters to release their stress. It was hugely successful and we quickly had requests for repeat 80’s events! We had about 170 supporters join us and raised over $8,700. We have to thank Sailrock for sponsoring this event, Lucid Illuminations for the awesome music, and Gilley’s Enterprises for always supporting and donating to our events.
Finally, we participated in the annual Art and Craft Expo with a stall dedicated to the charity.
We could not have done it without new members of our team this year – Joan and Tara! And volunteers at the schools who prepare and serve the food, and to those who have helped to sort, deliver, bake and lend a hand at events. Thank you.
Alongside all of this, we continued to gain more exposure for the charity with interviews, new brochures, new inventory and a new website! For this we need to thank Pete Craggs, Jennifer Maude, Erin Patrick and the Rebel.com team.
Just this week we also confirmed our next annual brunch, so keep a look out for those details. We also put together a new Events Committee to help us organise our brand-new event later in 2018 – we’re so excited to reveal the idea to you in a couple of months!
Happy New Year everybody!