Giving Tuesday with Shooting Star’s Children Hospice
Here at Natural Baby Shower, we love being able to support our wonderful charity partners - one being Shooting Star’s Hospice.
The team at Shooting Star’s Children’s Hospice help provide support for babies, children and young people with life-limiting conditions, and their families. They support families from diagnosis to end of life and throughout bereavement with a range of nursing, practical, emotional, and medical care.
Shooting Star’s provide an invaluable service to many families, which is why in preparation for Giving Tuesday 2021, we want to shout about the amazing work they do and how you can get involved to help support.
Shooting Star's Story
The story began as two separate children’s hospice charities. CHASE which was founded in 1994 and The Shooting Star Trust founded in 1995. In April 2011, the two charities merged to become Shooting Star Chase, with the two hospices Christopher’s in Guildford and Shooting Star House in Hampton able to provide more care for more children and families in London and Surrey. In February 2019 they updated their name to Shooting Star Children’s Hospices, to provide greater clarity about what they do.
Today they are a leading children’s hospice charity supporting children throughout Surrey and across 15 boroughs of London, 365 days a year. Their bespoke support is free of charge and includes a comprehensive range of therapies and support groups for the whole family, specialist nursing care and respite, symptom management, end-of-life care, as well as bereavement support.
Imogen's Story
They currently support 700 families living throughout Surrey and across 15 London boroughs, families like Imogen’s.
“I don’t think we’d be coping as well as we are if it hadn’t been for Shooting Star Children’s Hospices. From a personal point of view, emotionally I think I’d be a wreck. If you don’t know you’ve got that support there it’s an incredibly lonely place to be. We would be a very different family had it not been for Shooting Star Children’s Hospices – it’s helped all four of us in so many different ways.”
- Imogen’s mum, Kelly
Throughout the year, Shooting Star Children’s Hospices organise lots of fun events and activities for children and their families to enjoy and December will be no different. Families have been invited to an evening of ice-skating at Hampton Court, where they’ll have exclusive access to the ice rink!
The fantastic team at the palace will ensure that the ice rink is accessible for all, including manual and electric wheelchair users, so for many children this is the first time they get to experience the joy of ice skating.
We're also helping to create a magical Christmas grotto for all the children to enjoy! The space will be decked out with twinkling lights, fireplace setters, fluffy snow and much more. We've teamed up with three of of our favourite toys and gifts brands; Fabelab, Bookspeed and Micro-Scooters. With the help of these brands we're able to bring wonderful gifts to the hospice to adorn the tree with lovingly packed donated presents.
Natural Baby Shower are super excited to be able to support such an amazing charity and we are all looking forward to seeing the children’s reactions when they experience the grotto closer to Christmas.
How you can help
It takes £8.8 million a year to keep vital hospice services running and with just 8% of that income coming from central government funding, they rely on the generosity of supporters like you.
There are lots of ways you can get involved and their fundraising team are always on hand to help.
Explore more articles
