Skydive for Hope
When Paul got in touch to say that he was doing a Skydive to raise money for us, we were keen to learn more. This is his story:
"Doing a skydive is something I’ve always wanted to do, but never had the courage to – I struggle going up a set of stepladders and while I love rollercoasters and flying I guess it’s that I feel safe in those situations. Whereas falling out of a plane at 10,000 feet just doesn’t scan, it’s not rational, sensible or in any way something a human being should do. A few weeks ago the care home that my wife works for did the jump to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Society, and when someone dropped out last minute I was asked if I could do it and I said yes on the basis that I thought if I committed at short notice then I’d bully myself into it. Turned out that I couldn’t get the day off but I then decided to sign up and ‘carpe diem’ – the question then became which charity to choose?
At Next Doncaster (which has only been open 3 years), we already have a long track record of helping local and national charities. I think this is largely because we have an incredible culture of employing really friendly, helpful and empathetic people and not only is that great in terms of customer service, it also helps build the atmosphere we want at work – friendly and positive and wanting to help people. We’ve done the 3 Peaks for a local children’s hospice (2 ½ in my case, I’m not as fast as I was!), John O’Groats to Land’s End (which ended up going from there to Dover and onwards to Paris over an 8 day period!) for NET Cancer Trust – and we always like to choose ones that have supported or impacted us in some way, so there’s a real personal element to everything we do to raise funds.
We chose Hope Against Cancer because Next as a company are keen to support local charities too, and Hope Against Cancer is a superb charity doing great work in not only the Leicester and Rutland area but are also contributing to the efforts UK wide to find a cure to this horrible disease. Most of us have been affected by the impact of cancer at some stage – mums, dads, partners and even colleagues, the list goes on and it needs to stop. Forever. I have a real passion for giving cancer the boot and I’m not unique – we all hate it and I’d love it if in our lifetime we could talk about it in the same way our parents talked about polio – how it used to be a problem, but it’s gone."
A massive thank you to Paul and his colleagues at Next Doncaster, if you'd like to support them you can do at this JustGiving link:
www.justgiving.com/paulgoesairborne
