Russell Howard’s Good News 10 years on
Aug 2, 2020
10 years ago Post Pals was the good news feature at the end of ‘Russell Howard’s Good News’. We really hoped some of the viewers might decide to visit Post Pals and make a child smile. Maybe a handful of viewers would, we had no idea how the feature would change Post Pals!
On the day of the show our website crashed during the ending credits as so many people had logged on! Thousands of people sent an email to the Pals to make them smile, over £1000 was donated through our PayPal (an all time record for donations!) and then a week later photos rolled in from the families of their children surrounded by post with the HUGEST smiles on their face! Every time the show was repeated for a few years we would know simply by the increase in smiles being sent to the children.
With the donations we were able to launch our pillowcase project. Every Post Pals child (over 100 of them)had an artist design a pillowcase for them, often the child was made into a fairy or were playing with their favourite character. It was a project we had wanted to do for a long time but didn’t have the funds. All these years later many of the children still use their pillowcase, lots of them keep it in their hospital bag and have never been in hospital since without it!
As well as an increase in volunteers (many of our current volunteers first heard about us from Good News) we also had more families with a seriously ill child hear about us and apply to join. One of them was Holly. We were able to send post to Holly and her sister for 9 and half years, they came every year to our annual party, had a weekend trip with us to Chessington World of Adventures where we had a ride stopped and helped with lifting equipment so Holly could have her first theme park ride experience at the age of 15. During a 7 month intensive care admission Holly’s sister Ruby was struggling after being apart from both her Mum and sister for so long. We had Ruby and her Mum come to Chessington to spend some quality time together and Ruby had lots of fun with 2 other girls who had very unwell siblings, they all understood what each other have been through. We raised funds to grant the families with of a big party for Holly’s sweet 16th. Sadly earlier this year Holly passed away, we will continue to support Ruby and her parents for as long as she needs it. If they hadn’t been watching the show they would never of heard of Post Pals!
Holly is just one of the many stories of how being featured on the show enabled us to help so many more people. It’s amazing how much a 2 minute segment could change our charity so much! We can never thank Russell, the producer of the show and everyone who logged on and donated or sent a smile to a child enough!