Day 12 18 May 2026
I’ve had a week off training and a lovely holiday in South Wales. It’s not altogether been exercise-free though. I’ve done two swims in the sea, one at Stackpole quay and one in the blue lagoon near Abereiddi bay and we managed around 20,000 steps on most days. Its back to the gym today, then pumping up the bike tyres tomorrow for the final six weeks of training.
Please sponsor my bike ride here.
When I was much younger, I never found fund-raising a problem. I was a child in the days of the Brownie “bob-a -job” and happily knocked on strangers’ doors to raise funds. (A terrifying thought now a days, but I guess that living in a village back then meant that there were few strangers in reality). I also remember happily asking people for donations for various good causes when I was a student.
The intervening years have somehow made me feel very averse to asking for sponsorship or donations. This could well be due to those cold callers who ask you to sign up for numerous worthy charities, or the ones who accost you outside the supermarket. I feel a double empathy. They are supporting amazing causes, and it must be a pretty rubbish job. But even so, I am not often swayed, preferring to donate to those charities I have already decided to support, and I hate myself for giving the (essential) polite “Sorry no”, then walking swiftly off. I can imagine that they get a variety of responses from being politely ignored to being pretty much abused. I assume that they must get some funds or they wouldn’t do it, but I’m also concerned about the vulnerable people who may end up contributing when they can little afford it and have no idea what they are signing up to. Keeping my own mother safe from doorstep sellers was a nightmare when she was trying to live independently with the early stages of dementia. Politeness was too well established for her to just tell people to go away and she would feel that she could not interrupt them. As someone who has on occasion hidden under the kitchen table to avoid this very problem, I always sympathised with her.
The reality is that having survived the trauma of losing a daughter, I find myself having to face up to asking for funds to help prevent it happening to others. In the early days after losing Alice, this was easy. Anyone who had ever met Alice happily contributed to raising money in her name. The first £13,000 raised by sponsorship when I ran the Great North Run came in easily, although this all went to Womens’ Aid. A very worthwhile cause. But support kept on coming once we started the trust, and this was easy for us because volunteers stepped up to suggest an event and then to run it. Clive and I would just turn up on the day and be enormously grateful. Alice’s colleagues at Sky, her fencing friends, Leicester High School for Girls (where I worked) and the village were all amazing in this respect.
I ran the Great North Run a total of five times (so far!) and once virtually, I was one of their official heroes in 2018 and Clive and I were interviewed live by Alison Freeman for BBC television on the bridge over the start line. My brother Dave and sister-in-law Carolyn have also both completed the Great North Run to raise money for us and we usually have 5 charity places and a number of independent runners every year. Many people have completed other marathons, including the London marathon and the Leicester marathon. Paul Sibbert ran a marathon in full fencing kit and Carolyn Hills completed the Great North Run dressed as a turtle.
Dave and Carolyn have to be our star fund-raisers. Their main contribution is instigating and organising the bike rides, although they do an enormous amount extra too. We have cycled across England, Scotland and Ireland so far and raised thousands of pounds. This year is Ireland and we hope to increase this.
After the Covid outbreak, we began to see far fewer donations. Alice had become “old news” and the terrible reports of domestic violence during Covid meant that much of the spare money was going to support the victims. It seemed that people had less money to donate as well. We started the “24 challenge” to encourage fundraisers. The idea was that you could choose your own challenge as long as it incorporated 24 (Alice’s age when she was murdered). This was enormously successful and we had a wide range of “activities”. Running 24K was popular, but someone ran 10k for 24 days in a row. We had 24km swims and 24km rows. Lots of cycling. 24 Tiktok posts, 24 trust logo painted stones, 24 craft items made and sold, 24-hour walks, 24 villages walked to and many more. We are indebted to all the people who took part in this, and it played a major role in financing the trust for a number of years.
One of our big problems is that it is hard to quantify the good that we are doing. Just one school assembly to 100 pupils could have a significant effect in preventing many stalking incidents, but it is well nigh impossible to prove this. We are playing the long game here. If we can reach every pupil at some point in their education, then we should see a massive improvement ten to fifteen years down the line. This is a hard sell compared to (for example) providing an immediate bed in a refuge for victims of domestic abuse, but the long-term effects will be way more effective.
Another problem is that it is difficult to break out our fundraising to people who are outside the circle of those that knew Alice or know us. There are some new supporters, but we need more. I hate the fact that I am constantly asking the same set of people to donate yet again.
There is no easy answer to this. As a charity, we have never stopped expanding. Clive and
I both work for the charity but accept no fees other than expenses. Clive is the CEO and this takes up a lot of his time. We both give talks about Alice to a wide range of audiences. Schoolchildren, teachers, police forces, CPS, magistrates and many more. We do not charge for our talks to schools (although many donate), but other talks bring in a lot of money for the trust. In the long term (given our ages and that I also have to work to support myself) this is not sustainable. We need to be able to employ a CEO and find funding streams that do not rely on fleecing our friends! We are moving in the right direction and are beginning to get grants to pay for projects and partially fund our manager. We hope we are turning a corner.
But we are always going to have to continue to fundraise. So, if you are reading this, please consider supporting us. Making a donation, even if it is just 50p to show solidarity will be most welcome. At the end of the day, it all adds up.
And the final cheeky sentence. You can sponsor my bike-ride here.
