Charity & Community
Students at St Mary’s are keen to be involved in their communities and to give their support to charities.
Charity fundraising
Several thousand pounds in donations are raised every year by St Mary’s families. Fundraising activities are student-led, by members of the Charities Committee at the Lower School and by a range of student leaders at the Senior School, including the House Officials, Round Square Committee and Miss Comrie Scholars. Lower and Senior School students choose a charity to support each academic year – these are proposed and voted for by the students themselves and are often causes close to the students’ hearts. The school also energetically supports national fundraising initiatives, including Children in Need and Red Nose Day. International charities are also supported – the school takes an active part in the Mary’s Meals’ Backpack Project, the Samaritans Purse Shoebox Appeal and the Toilet Twinning scheme. Locally, the school is a long-standing supporter of St Helena Hospice and the Senior School House Officials have recently organised the collection of a minibus-full of donations of toiletries, sanitary items and non-perishable food items for Bernard Brett House, a Colchester-based organisation supporting disadvantaged and insecurely housed young people aged 16-25.
Annual charities
Senior School students chose to support the Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity this year, in memory of a St Mary’s student who received care there. The Round Square Committee will also continue to focus their fundraising efforts on benefiting The Catherine Bullen Foundation, a West Mersea-based international charity involved in a number of humanitarian projects to help the relief of poverty, sickness and distress and to preserve health in rural Namibia. We have previously raised enough money for new school uniforms for all students at Good Hope Primary School, and would like to make sure we are also able to raise enough money for each student to have a new pair of school shoes.
