A family of letter writers
It’s not often that we hear of a whole family writing for us, but when we do, we love it! And it seems everyone else loves to hear about it too after their story of writing together for us made headlines last weekend - with it featuring in The Independent, The Evening Standard, The Daily Mirror and 150 other regional and national news outlets!
The Jourdain family are the perfect advert for encouraging other families to get together to write for us. They wanted to support their eldest daughter, Isla, with her Silver Duke of Edinburgh Award - where she had put herself forward to write letters for us regularly as part of the volunteering section.
As a family, they get together every Sunday evening and write - and because of the age ranges and interests, it makes for the most fantastic bundle of letters to receive, even including pictures drawn by Isla’s younger sister, Alyssa.
As a result of the media coverage of the Jourdain’s story, we’ve had people registering to write for our Donate A Letter programme and wanting to get involved in our work, which is wonderful!
Last year we saw a 25% increase in requests for our letters, so we need to keep up with this demand by encouraging people to put pen to paper for us. Letters don’t need to be about anything in particular - all we ask is that they offer the reader the opportunity to escape into them for a few moments, taking them away from treatment.
Some of the best letters simply recount a day out, a view of the garden, a silly story, or just talk about the seasons.
If you’ve found us after reading the Jourdain’s story and want to get involved, we’d love to hear from you. Simply register on our Donate A Letter page and we’ll send you a pack to get you started. We also run regular free letter writing workshops online that we’d love you to come along to - they are perfect for getting you started and you might love it so much that you join our Letter Writing Club to meet like-minded people.
We have a Spring letter writing competition open at the moment (18th March - 14th April) and would love you to send in a letter (or more than one if you can). There’s a wonderful prize bundle up for grabs for the winner.
We know it’s only together that we can continue to help people facing cancer, so the more people involved in our work, the better. Thank you!