3rd Tonbridge Guides, in Girlguiding Kent Weald county, meet every Tuesday evening in the centre of Tonbridge. As a group located right in the heart of our town, each term we try and do something to support our community. When we heard that Girlguiding LaSER was supporting Macmillan Cancer Support's annual World's Biggest Coffee Morning campaign as part of their ongoing partnership with the charity, we decided to get involved straight away. We all love cake at the best of times! We received our coffee morning pack from Macmillan in the post and got planning.
Our Macmillan coffee evening
Written by Heather Smith, leader, 3rd Tonbridge Guides
The first ever World's Biggest Coffee Morning was held in 1990, and since then the initiative has raised over £200 million for Macmillan. There are currently 2.5 million people living with cancer in the UK, which is over 400,000 more than just five years ago, so the work Macmillan do is more important than ever.
Our Guides meet each week in the hall above Christ Church on Tonbridge High Street. The church has a cafe downstairs that they use after service on a Sunday, and they very kindly agreed to let us use it during one of our meetings to hold our own coffee evening. We invited along friends and family members and opened the cafe doors onto the high street to welcome members of the public as well.
On the evening our Guides, young leaders and unit leaders all brought homemade cakes along - so many that we needed to use three tables to display them all! As soon as we opened the doors we had a stream of people arriving to buy a piece of cake (or two!) and a cup of tea - our young leaders and Guides did a great job of keeping on top of sales and collecting the money. It was great to see so many familiar faces join us to help raise some money, then stick around to enjoy their tea and cake and sit down for a chat.
Although we had a huge amount of cakes we sold nearly all of them - and those we didn't sell were soon swept up by our Guides who had all brought along some of their own pocket money to treat themselves!
At the end of the evening, we were delighted to find that we had raised over £170 for Macmillan. So many people who came along were incredibly generous, donating a few pennies extra or putting their change back into the pot. It was fantastic to be able to raise some money for such a worthy cause, as well as having a really fun evening and getting to eat some cakes ourselves!
We're all looking forward to next year's event already!
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