I blogged a few weeks ago about one of our most resilient
supports, Jo Earlam, who is herself a
blogger. She writes about her remarkable
effort to complete 50 marathons by the time she reaches 50 in 2015. Her running
is her fundraising, which is where BRACE comes in, but the running and blog are
both about so much more.
It seems that Jo’s blog has attracted what she calls her
“first heckler”. The heckler wrote, “Better
to let the whole world think you are boring, than to write a blog and prove
them 100% right.”
Okay, it was pointlessly unkind and, as far as I am
concerned, complete rubbish. However, it did give me pause to think about what
is interesting in fundraising and the related news which charities publish.
The blunt fact is that most fundraising events are not
interesting to read about. You wouldn’t want to read a blow by blow account of
a volunteers’ coffee morning unless, of course, it all went horribly wrong in
hilarious fashion, as if scripted by Alan Ayckbourn. You might be impressed by
someone’s efforts in an urban marathon, but you wouldn’t read several hundred
words about paving stones, pedestrians and pigeons.
What makes their efforts interesting is that they are part
of a bigger story, perhaps several bigger stories. People who raise funds for
BRACE usually do so because their lives have been cruelly touched by dementia
and they want to fight back. It’s their
stories, not the making of cakes or the abseiling down the office block, which
people want to read about. When they team up with BRACE, their stories
intersect with a broader human story about what dementia does to ordinary lives
and how we are trying to lift its curse.
We put Jo on the front of our Newsletter after her first
marathon for BRACE, not because she had raised money for us, but because she
had a story to tell. The how became the why and the who, and every volunteer, fundraiser
and donor would have recognised something of themselves in what she wrote.
People who send us their stories and photos after their fundraising
is completed give us help above and beyond the money they add to our research
fund. They help other people understand why they do what they do and why it is
that beating dementia matters to ordinary people everywhere. They give us
colour and humanity, and we relate so much better to these warm qualities than
to scientific words signifying proteins and processes in the brain.
More generally, what makes human beings interesting and
remarkable is their ability to take the ordinary and do something extraordinary
with it. Our volunteers take cake making and long distance running and turn
them into research funds. They often take personal grief and turn it into hope
for others. I think of it as a sort of alchemy, and it’s definitely not boring.
BRACE works all the time with community groups and local
businesses. It helps us get our message out and about – face to face, on paper
or online. When I met Hilary to discuss ways we could help one another in and
around her part of Bristol, I discovered that she had worked for the
Alzheimer’s Society and knows a lot about supporting people with dementia and
their families. She wrote out some useful advice for anyone thinking of setting
up a support group for carers. It’s a bit long to paste straight into my blog
but, if you’d like a copy, just email me and I’ll send it to you. 
