Tuesday 1st October 2019 - New month, new impetus. We fight on.

Lazza with Una O'Halloran (ex-mayor of Islington)

at Cripplegate event at Islington Town Hall

Posted 3:00pm

Firstly, am I glad that August and September are over - two very difficult months for different reasons that greatly affected HMHB.  Last month, in particular, was tough, as Lazza was ill for most of it, with a nasty chest infection and cold that knocked him for six. Not only that, his knee problems are increasing and we hope that a specialist next week can pass on good advice.

The lottery knock back was hard to take. We clearly need seed funding, but it was not the end of the world. More than ever, though, we are now reliant on monies from other avenues so we can go back ot the lottery with a lower bid, but demonstrating we can find alternative funding. Talk about stress!!!

The picture at the top comes from Islington Town Hall last night, at an event run by Islington Council and the Cripplegate Foundation, focusing on local community organisations who have, in the past, successfully applied for monies from the Islington Community Chest Fund.

HMHB have recently completed another application (I will mention that again in the next paragraph), but this event gave us an opportunity to promote HMHB again, especially our fitness sessions and walks.  We bumped into Una - who was Mayor on our first Izzwalkz birthday. She told us that Izzwalkz was her one of her favourite events from her time as Mayor. Wow!!!!

The recent application I mentioned has been received. In fact Lazza, Luke and Dean went along to the Cripplegate offices to meet and chat with Patrick, one of the funding officers. He gave us some terrific feedback, asked some very pertinent questions, and I have just sent him over some other information that he required. I am really hoping we are successful with this application. It will give us an opportunity to show the Islington Job Centres just who we are and what we can do. And, we will get another opportunity to work with Single Homeless Project.  It will fund eight day events between January and March - six with the Job Centres and two with SHP.

I will send off this week our application to Camden Giving - and more on that when I deliver it. Plus we are meeting with a representative from Haringey Giving tomorrow. More on that following the meeting.  Apologies for the small amount of information in September, but we are roaring again so aiming for daily entries all this month. Yay!!!