IT HAS been an unprecedented time which has hit charities and projects hard as they faced mounting pressures during lockdown and emerging from the pandemic.

Volunteer armies up and down the country, who were able to keep going, put their heart and soul into helping others, however for other projects making a difference in their communities, they simply couldn’t run services or the same level of service people had come to rely on.

And key to helping all of these charities change people’s lives is the funding they so desperately need to operate. Traditional fundraising paths were simply cut off during lockdown and income generating events drawing large numbers of fundraisers couldn’t be held.

While we might be emerging from the pandemic, our charities are now looking to the future and trying to build services again while fundraising pots continue to struggle.
Our parent company’s charitable arm, The Gannett Foundation, is providing £125,000 in cash to support local charities across the country and we are delighted to have a £20,000 share to give away in our area. 

And we want YOU to decide where this money should be spent through our Readers Choice Cash for Charity.

Making a nomination couldn’t be easier – simply log-on to our website and go to heraldscotland.com/readerschoice and fill in your nomination form. You can also write to us, confirming the name and address of the charity you’d like to nominate and why to: Readers’ Choice Cash For Charity Nominations, Newsquest Scotland, 125 Fullarton Drive, Cambuslang, Glasgow, G32 8FG by the closing date of Sunday 3rd October 2021.

Once all nominations have been received, our editorial panel will select eight of the most popular local charities to be featured in this year’s grants scheme. We’re then going to put the power to allocate the cash back into the hands of our readers – for four weeks, readers will be invited to collect tokens from our newspapers which can then be sent to collection points across our region or posted. Each token collected will then be used to allocate cash to the nominated charity – so if your favourite charity collects 50% of all to tokens collected, it will receive 50% of the £20,000!

Donald Martin, editor of The Herald and editor-in-chief of Newsquest Scotland, said: “We know that the past 18 months have been particularly difficult for charities who do tremendous work in our communities and make a difference to people every day.

“It is why we wanted to say thank you for everything they and their volunteers do and to support them in their continuing efforts. We hope our Readers Choice Cash for Charity fund will help organisations and it is an opportunity for our readers to get involved and tell us who they think deserves a little help in these times.”

The Herald has a share of a £20,000 cash offer and we will be accepting nominations from Tuesday September 7 until Sunday October 3. We are looking for readers to tell us who they think should be nominated and charities can also nominate themselves.

Tell us what has inspired you to nominate your chosen charity – is it the work they do, how they have helped or the dedication of its volunteers. We want to hear your stories.

An editorial judging panel will then meet to judge nominations from the region, which also includes our sister titles the Glasgow Times and the Greenock Telegraph. Eight charities will go forward to the next stage and our readers can also play their part.

We will be running a readers’ token collect from Monday November 1 to Sunday November 28.

In just over 10 years the Gannett Foundation has made grants totalling nearly £4million in the UK.

In 2018 it awarded £28,000 to Glasgow groups including Glasgow Children’s Holiday Scheme and Cue and Review talking newspapers society.

Previously the Trust awarded a range of grants including £1560 to Pollokshaws Area Network, to pay for a polytunnel, greenhouse and cookery equipment as part of a community garden project.