Focus article for July 2012

News from the Lions Den...

Eaton Bray & Edlesborough Lions .... best in the UK!

We are delighted to announce that you have an award winning Lions club in your community! Since our very first Focus article detailing our plans for the formation of the club, we have been compiling a scrap book detailing all of our activities, pictures of our events and evidence of our social activities. In March we were awarded a district prize for our scrapbook and community service which then gave us automatic entry into the national competition. With just 10 months of history, we didn’t feel terribly confident, especially when we saw the competition we were up against. However, we were utterly delighted to be awarded the best in the United Kingdom. We are obviously very proud of our scrap book and now plan to upload a virtual copy of it onto our website so that you can all see first hand our progress. The scrap book is usually present when we hold our open evenings and we are planning to bring along our trophies to be displayed on our stand at the carnival so you will be able to share in our success.

The Spinal Injury evening we held was a complete sell out and raised around £200 for the National Spinal Injury Awareness campaign. The following night was our Paradox tribute night where some of you literally danced the night away and helped us to raise a further £865.00 which is being donated to Stoke Manderville hospital intensive care unit.

The trip to Foulness Island on 9th June was also thoroughly enjoyed by all who attended and we continue to raise funds for the high visibility children’s waistcoats we wrote about last month. However, as if that wasn’t enough, we are about to trail another community service project and this is where we need your help.

Fancy some fish and chips?

We are hoping to start a monthly fish and chip delivery service to housebound residents in our villages. We were initially approached by Social Services and Bedfordshire Rural Communities Charity who brought to our attention a number of people who are unable to walk as far as the fish and chip shop. As soon as we heard this, we knew we wanted to help. Through working with these charities, we have committed to a trial of this project starting on Friday 27th July.

If there are any "housebound" residents who fancy a fish and chip supper delivering to them on Friday 27th July, please call me by Wednesday 25th July. We will then collect your payment on Thursday 26th July and will delivery your supper to you on Friday 27th between 6 and 7pm depending on the number of orders we receive.

If this is a success, we then plan to start a ‘fish and chip’ club where people can register with us for a monthly delivery service. We must stress that we are not making any money from this – you will only pay for the cost of your supper. Our delivery service will be a free of charge community service project.

Like all of these things, it will only be a success with your help so if you feel you would benefit from this or know anyone who might then please do get in touch. The trial night will test the demand for this service so please don’t think, "I will wait until it is established before I place my order" ....this may mean you miss out if we don’t see enough demand.

Hopefully the community in general is starting to see the benefit of having a Lions Club and the impact it can have on everyone’s life, from the potentially life saving high visibility waistcoats for our local children through to the food delivery service for our elderly or housebound residents and a whole host of other activities in between. If you have a few hours to spare and feel you would like to get involved with us then please do get in touch – as always, more members are always welcome and the more members we have, the bigger impact our community will feel overall.

Alternatively, if you know of someone who may benefit from our help then please do let us know.

We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at the carnival in July – not only will we have lots of fun games for you to take part in, there will also be lots of information about Lions available for you and of course, you will have the opportunity to meet us all in person. Dont forget that every penny we raise at carnival this year will go towards funding high visibility waistcoats for our local primary school children so please, please do support your local Lions club.

Ordinary people doing amazing things