Awards, celebrations and smiles: exactly what the doctor ordered
Awards, celebrations and smiles is exactly what we saw at our event on Thursday 1st July, the night before the Devon County Show, celebrating 20 Years of the Addington Fund.
Ralph Rayner enjoying the sunshine and a glass of prosecco.
Despite having limited guests invited due to ongoing restrictions, the event went perfectly, with plenty of prosecco glasses sparkling in the evening sunshine and big smiles on people’s faces whilst catching up, after not seeing each other for over a year and a half.
Bill Young CEO, Peter Jinman Chairman of the Trustees and Peter Beaumont Managing Director at Cornish Mutual (Principal Sponsor) gave fantastic informative and charismatic speeches to start the evening. Annie Winn (Marketing and Events Manager) presented the two very special Addington awards to the winning category short listers and even “Our Sue” (Sue English Deputy Director) was given a surprise award for working 20 years at the Addington Fund.
Holly Beckett (Operations and Marketing Assistant) and Mike Williams (Project Manager) did an outstanding job selling raffle tickets throughout the evening, which raised £785 in total.
Peter Beaumont, Managing Director at Cornish Mutual, Principal Sponsor 2021.
Rob, Helen and Will Taverner at Orange Elephant Ice Cream Parlour won this year’s Covid Resilience Award 2021. Chosen as the winners for thinking quickly on their feet when the pandemic hit by introducing a Covid safe one-way drive through system to sell their ice cream and also successfully setting up food bank in Exeter, the Taverners have said “ We are thrilled to have won the Addington Fund Covid Resilience Award for our ice cream drive thru.” They continued to say “It seemed like a bit of a barmy idea 18 months ago but it’s definitely here to stay!” .
We would also like to congratulate our runners up The Mounce Family at Strawberry Fields and Hunts Cider.
Left to right front to back: Will Taverner, Rob Taverner, Peter Beaumont, Deborah Custance-Baker, Peter Jinman, Bill Young, Annie Winn.
Our second award, Community Champion 2021, was given to Deborah Custance-Baker, who organised and coordinated the World’s Longest Knitted Bunting challenge during the lockdown back in the summer of 2020, which broke the Guinness World Record. It took a fantastic amount of effort, organisation and coordination skills to successfully pull this off and not only that, Deborah kept plenty of knitters knitting during the first lockdown, when many people were feeling at a loss. The bunting reached 14,279 metres and is now being sold with all proceeds coming direct to us, to support our work within the farming community.
Deborah encourages “anyone and everyone to buy some bunting as there is plenty to go round, especially as the proceeds go to such a good cause.”
Congratulations to the runners up Gareth Hutchings Chair of Devon County Young Farmers and Colin Smallacombe who runs the FCN network in his area.
We are truly grateful to those who came to our very first event since December 2019. The support and enthusiasm to get our fundraising events back on track is invaluable and we would not be able to continue helping the farming community in the future years to come without the loyal support of our generous donors, supporters and corporate sponsorship.
Thank you to Cornish Mutual for being Principal Sponsor this year and thank you to PKF Francis Clark for sponsoring the drinks reception.
A special thanks goes to our volunteer helpers Lynne Dickens and Allyson Bottrill who helped us on the evening and throughout the show itself and another goes to UK Agriculture Finance Ltd, NFU & NatWest for donating gorgeous food hampers for our raffle.
And last but not least, we would like to thank and congratulate the Devon County Agricultural Association and everyone working on the Devon County Show for hosting such a successful and memorable show. Well done and thank you, as always, for your continuing support and enthusiasm for our charity.
If you would like to donate to support our work, click here. If you are interested in buying some bunting please call or email Annie on 01926 620135 or enquiries@addingtonfund.org.uk
