The Body Shop Foundation

Brighton Marathon Fundraiser at HM Revenue & Customs, Worthing

Our volunteers & supporters never cease to surprise us.  Not content with training during in all weathers, through injury and slotting in with a heavy work schedule, they are fast becoming fundraising gurus extraordinaire!

Take Philippa Challis and Alan Scott for example.  They asked if they could hold a Glee type bake sale to raise money for their Brighton Marathon targets.

Here’s an update from the lovely Philippa, explaining the team effort behind the fundraiser. (PS If you haven’t eaten yet, this is going to make you REALLY hungry….)

This was certainly one amazing effort. We needed clearance from senior management to run a charity event at work and our ‘charity committee person’, Margaret, put together a very good case for us (this being the first time a cake sale has been allowed in this building apparently) so we were going to be doing a bit of culinary & charity trail blazing it seemed! Once the St Patrick’s Day date had been set for the cake sale the planning stepped up a gear or several.

Offers to bake, donate & support came from all around with many animated discussions about recipes and impromptu sharing & purchasing of mouth watering Nigella cook books! In fact Nigella ended up having a lot to answer for in all manner of wonderful & sumptuous chocolatey extravaganzas, of which more later…

Veronica kept us all focussed & motivated as we planned the cake & savoury sale. Alan’s trialling in the office of various samples of home baking were a joy! In fact there were a number of generous trial efforts brought in for sampling by Alan, Veronica & Hannah – so it’s particularly galling that I managed to miss the majority of these & just hear about the finer details afterwards…

In the days leading up to the Big Cake Day we agreed roughly who was bringing what (cakes, savouries, clingfilm, knives, plates, float etc etc); started putting together a price list; agreed which actual desk tops would be the sale area and the logistics of what if there were too many people & too few cakes or what if there were too few people & too many cakes (the latter being significantly less of a problem we felt…….. J !)

Publicity of the event was key. Margaret (charity committee) again excelled herself by posting details on our internal comms and making us colourful posters. We also had some wonderful individual posters created by the children of people on the team, their artwork was outstanding and it was huge boost to have so many outstanding & unique posters to advertise the event with.

On the day itself magnificant bought & home baked sweet & savoury contributions began to arrive from all directions. My sister Viv dropped off 2 huge trays of little butter cream iced butterfly cakes, Val delivered Belgium chocolate crispies, Hannah was up til midnight the night before making a gorgeous gooey chocolatey Nigella cake, Helen R brought a tray of Nigella’s fridged chocolatey Rocky Road, Alan brought half a fabulous bakery-load with him including his legendary courgette cake, some of the most amazing white chocolate and cream icing in a large tub & a selection of delicious nut bread muffins and Charlie made fab fruit cake – to name but a handful of the full selection.

The Speciality Of The (St Patrick’s) Day went unchallenged to Veronica for Nigella’s Chocolate & Guinness Cake, let me just repeat that, Nigella’s Chocolate & Guinness Cake!!!!!!!! And did I mention the cream cheese & cream topping she piled on top of that, thought not…… and so the Nigella chocolate standard had been firmly set and bar (no pun intended…) raised at one & the same time. Those of us who arrived with dairy-free pineapple & carrot buns (thank you Helen G!), pecan cake or lemon drizzle (the latter from Susanna, our fab charity cake sale mentor) or selection of pizzas and cheese straws could only look on in wonder at such extravagant, mouth watering & sheer sumptuous (to use several Nigella-isms) chocolateyness….

10am came round all too quickly as we set out our stall & a long queue of customers were there & waiting at 10 sharp. There was a rabbit-caught-in-headlights micro-pause as we realised that this was it, the sale had begun. Then our ‘professional organisational skills’ kicked in – as we rushed around madly slicing, serving & wrapping! We’d printed off some price lists so dished those out for people in the queue to savour whilst they waited. The original price list was in Microsoft Word but when it needed a much needed last minute sort out Helen R quickly converted it to M. Excel and re-formatted and sorted at great speed (just hitting our 10am deadline!) for easier alphabetical listing – and we also hurriedly albeit belatedly e-mailed copies to other offices to encourage telephone orders.

‘Customers’ to the cake sale deserve a special mention as so many recognised the more serious fund raising side of the sale and were warm & generous with their interest and support. Others were simply determined not to miss the event – one lady came in on her day off to buy cake to take home for the builders working there! There was also appreciation and recognition by everyone of the Body Shop Foundation’s own support for the event with their very kind donation of two huge & beautiful baskets of products and there was a steady sale of tickets resulting in two extremely happy raffle prize winners.

The quantity of cakes & savouries supplied meant we rolled over the cake sale to the following day and left an ‘honesty box’ for donations alongside the rolls of cling film and baking foil. The final toll (so far anyway..) stands at around £303. Feedback has been fantastic, everything from how delicious the cakes were to praise for the fundraising itself. It was truly a magnificent team effort with so many incredible, generous and completely voluntary individual contributions all going towards making up the whole. And it was a wonderful demonstration of the power people have to make magic happen and to influence change for the better in this world. “