Gill Astarita Memorial Fund raises further £21.5k

Thanks to the generosity of delegates at the International Fundraising Congress (IFC) in the Netherlands last month, the Gill Astarita Memorial Fund raised a further £21.5K to add to the £23,000 already raised – and against a target of £5,000.

Gill Astarita was a widely respected fundraiser and chief executive of Volunteer Reading Help, who lost her battle against cancer last year. The Fund was set up by Gill’s husband Mark Astarita, director of fundraising at the British Red Cross, and run (as part of The Fundraisers Fund) by the Resource Alliance.

The Fund aims to raise standards of fundraising in the developing world by awarding bursaries for fundraising training.  It is designed to ensure that fundraisers working for social causes are able to take advantage of appropriate training and development to improve their skills.

To date, the Fund has provided bursaries for over 20 individuals from eight countries to attend the 9th International Workshop on Resource Mobilisation (IWRM) in Bangalore, India in May 2009 and for 30 individuals to attend the 15-day intensive course on resource mobilisation and communications in India, Malaysia and Africa.

Mark Astarita, who gave a moving speech at the IFC, said he was “most touched” by the story of one fundraiser from India who, when seeing details of one of the courses, baulked at the attendance fee because it was more than their charity’s annual income.

Fundraisers raised more money at the IFC through a bit of old-fashioned fundraising – rattling tins, shaking buckets and just asking! More than £1,000 was raised in the retro-fundraising effort and even more through face-to-face methods at the reception following Mark’s speech.
If you weren’t there, it’s not too late to donate. There’s a page at Just Giving for the fund that you can go to by clicking here.

Just to show how generous fundraisers really are, a further £2,700 was raised for the Fundraisers Fund.