Miles in Memory of Helen Armitage

In May this year we at Fostering People lost our Office Manager Helen Armitage, following her brave battle against cancer, but more than that, we lost a dear friend and colleague.

Helen worked with Fostering People for over a decade and the impact she had on our agency and to us as individuals can’t be underestimated.

She was a rare individual that demanded the highest of standards must be met, she pushed us all to be better – partly because we were all a little anxious of falling short of her high expectations, but mainly because of her warmth, kindness and patience brought out the best in all that worked with her.

Helen was a perfectionist who set high standards for herself and Fostering People, but she would always go the extra mile to ensure that people knew what they needed to be doing in order to meet those expectations.

With this in mind, we want to honour Helen’s memory in a way that is fitting to how she lived her life, whilst doing our part to help less people being taken long before their time to this devastating diseases.

Every year approximately 7,600 women die due to bowel cancer in the UK.  So in a truly Helen tradition of setting incredibly high standards, we want to represent every single life lost with a mile, because of the extra mile Helen would always go.

On the weekend of 16^th and 17^th October we want to come together as one team, foster parents, children, staff and their families to cover 7,600 miles in 48 hours.

We’d be delighted if you’d join in our efforts.  You can cover a many miles as you like as an individual or a family, in whatever way you like as long as there isn’t an engine involved!

Walk, run, cycle, row or roller blade it’s up to you.  Every single mile covered by every single individual counts, so if you are a family of 5 and walk for 2 miles – that’s 10 miles towards our total or if you are a family of 3 and go on a 10 mile bike ride, that’s 30 miles and so on.

We’d like as many Fostering People families as possible to take part; we have really set an ambitious target, but many hands make light work as they say and every single mile counts.

To take part just one member of each family needs to register on the form above.

Once you’ve registered you’ll be added to a What’s App group which will run over the course of the weekend.  We’ll use this group to share updates of the miles we have covered, you can share photos of what you’ve done to cover the miles, funny tales if any happen along the way, amazing achievements made by our young people, and adults too and we can also share any stories we have of Helen too.

We’ll use some of the shared photos and stories to put together a book in our office and also share a copy to Helen’s partner Albert too, as a memento of how much Helen meant to us all at Fostering People.

We envisage this being a wonderful event where we are all in it together, albeit virtually. Where everyone can do as much towards our target as they are comfortable with, some of you will want to go out there and do amazing things, others will do the normal weekend dog walk and it all counts!

Helen was as equally proud of Fostering People as we were in her, we believe she would be enormously proud of us coming together in this way together to raise some money for a worthwhile cause, whilst working together as a community and sharing our experiences and hopefully having some fun along the way.

We have already set up our Just Giving Page for this event, so please feel free to contribute and share if you wish too.

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/fosteringpeopleinmemoryofhelen