Fundraiser

Spreading hope for Levi

Black Saturday Fires

According to Wikipedia: “The Black Saturday Bushfires were a series of bushfires that ignited or were burning across Victoria on and around Saturday, 7th of February 2009. The fires occurred during extreme bushfire-weather conditions and resulted in Australia’s highest ever loss of life from a bushfire; 173 people died and 414 were injured as a result of the fires.

As many as 400 individual fires were recorded on the 7th of February. Following the events of the 7th of February 2009 and its aftermath, that day has become widely referred to as Black Saturday.” Disclaimer

When we heard of the devastation, we were coming up with all sorts of ways to help out bushfire victims.

Our local Primary School joined forces with a local CFA volunteer and appealed for food and other donations.

The CFA volunteer of 13 years recruited us on to his Victorian Fires – Black Saturday 7th Feb 2009 site,  after setting it up the day after the main fire.

Our School became one of more than 19 collection points around Melbourne listed on the Facebook site for people to drop off anything from underwear and pyjamas to dog leads and can openers.

Thankfully two transport company directors had also come on board with offers to help pick up and deliver donations.

The local IGA supermarket had chipped in with empty cardboard boxes for packaging up the goods and a pharmacy had donated toiletries and baby formula.

We were overwhelmed by the support from the School community and were kept busy all week sorting through clothing and household items.

Cause for Lara & Beth

On the 9th of May 2012, I took it upon myself with the help of a few friends to start a fundraiser through Facebook for Lara & Beth, sisters, that were both in hospital with unknown illnesses. Lara was seven weeks old & Beth, 20 months old.

Little Lara had been unable to tolerate any form of food & spent the three weeks full-time in hospital after going back & forth for the first few weeks of her life. The doctors were uncertain if there was a severe allergy or if there were gastro-intestinal issues, she underwent a biopsy to hopefully find answers to this little babe’s mystery illness.

Beth suffered a seizure and was admitted to hospital for further investigation & an unknown illness, the doctors have discovered intermittent hyperactivity in her brain indicating she will have more seizures as well as a slow part of her brain which they are unsure if it was damaged due to the seizures or if it will degenerate, therefore she needs to be monitored by the neurologists closely.

Both girls had procedures requiring general anaesthetic within days of each other.

Lara & Beth’s parent’s Brian & Karen had used up all the leave they could possibly take & were starting to head into crisis mode financially.

I set up an auction to help raise a goal amount of $1500 to help this lovely family at their time of need.

Many items were added through donations to keep the auction going in the hope of meeting our goal.

We had over 70 items donated & when we tallied the Auction bids we had raised an astounding $4,030!