The Royal Albert Hall has been hosting concerts in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust since 2000, with the biggest names in music and comedy coming together each year to raise money to help young people facing the chaos of cancer. Last month seven of us from Impact volunteered our time to attend the event, most of us making the trip from the Lakes down to London, to shake our buckets to help raise money - one of us flew back from Florida to London that morning!
It’s a strange experience being on the bucket shaking side of money raising. You see so many people in the high street and in supermarkets doing it and it’s so easy to walk straight past, without acknowledging the people behind the bucket. It takes a huge amount of motivation, charisma and willpower to carry on with a smile on your face when so many people are ignoring you.
On the night, the ‘Impact 7’ shook their buckets with utter professionalism, bar one blip when we ran into one of England’s biggest sporting icons and ex-Impact participant, Martin Johnson. It was hard to miss him, standing easily head and shoulders above the sea of people flooding in. The man was a giant and like a precision surfer I navigated the waves of people and shook my bucket in his direction, before asking for a picture.
I honestly don’t think you will ever see a bigger grin on my face! He also put a tenner in my bucket, and just like that, motivation levels increased tenfold.
In total, we managed to raise £6,660.54 on the night we attended, unfortunately they didn’t tell us how much we as a group raised but the heaviness of our buckets was commented on!
Impact Aid has been working with Teenage Cancer Trust for the last 2 years and in that time we have managed to raise over £10,000 through our internal fundraising, not including the outside work we also do with them. It is a fantastic achievement and an amazing team to be a part of.
Connor Gildert is part of Impact Aid and works in the Programme Management Team.