Futurestars Charity was delighted with the support we received from Denholm Handling Ltd for our School Books for Africa Appeal 2020.
The appeal culminated in a 20ft container kindly donated by Fendercare, completely full of books, sports kit, sports equipment donated by many organisations including Copleston School, Arsenal FC, Ipswich Town FC, and Norwich City FC.
Denholm staff including Futurestars trustee Bryan King, joined our directors and volunteers in the huge job of counting and listing every donated item and compiling the full packing list to get the container ready to be shipped. Unsurprisingly this took several sessions of listing, packing, and loading and we finally closed the container doors in October 2020, ready for shipment to Ghana in November 2020.
The container is now based at the Tema Sports Stadium and the Futurestars Ghana team has started the job of unloading and distributing goods to the children in our partner schools in Tema and Accra. To coincide with World Book Day we are planning a ‘Share a Story week’ to kick start the launch of fledgling libraries in each of our partner schools. This is only possible as a result of an amazing 25,000 donated books.
This is the third container from Fendercare that Futurestars have shipped out and planning has started for the next one in 2022. The donations from the UK of sports kit, equipment, books, and clothes has already benefitted thousands of underprivileged children in our partner schools.
We are totally indebted to companies like Denholm Handling for allowing us the use of their warehouse and loading area to store and load the container, and of course, the brilliant volunteer staff who help with the packing. Fendercare and Denholm also organised the smooth delivery of the container to the London Gateway port for shipping, thank you – we couldn’t have done it without you!
