A potted history of my fundraising efforts for ‘Adopt a Potter’ reads like this:

In sleepy Montgomery 127 people rose from their sofas and battled the elements to visit the ‘Endangered Species’ exhibition during the 10 days, in which ‘The Old Bell Museum’ opened its creaky portal.  The ‘Adopt a Potter’ Raffle attracted a lot of genuine interest with 10 prizes on display, of which seven had been kindly donated by local potters from Powys, Shropshire and Herefordshire.  My thanks go to my colleagues Jacqui Atkin, Charmain Poole, Howie Schiansky, Andrew Crouch and Simon Hulbert, who provided lovely samples of their work.  The money raised amounts to the rather modest sum of £348, which breaks down as follows:

1) 3 x ‘Adopt A Potter’ T-shirt Sales = £30

2) 172 raffle tickets (65 sold in strips of 5 at £8; 107 sold as individual tickets at £2/each) = £318

I would also like to give credit to some of the local businesses who helped to advertise the event by displaying posters and hand-outs on their cafe tables, blackboards and in their guest rooms (The Dragon Hotel, Castle Kitchen, The Ivy House, The Checkers).  Paul and Louise Hodgson, owners of Castle Kitchen kindly helped me to meet some of the exhibition-related costs whilst Adam Kusack took photographs and put up information about the exhibition and ‘Adopt a Potter’ Raffle on Montgomery’s website.  Last but not least my friends Paul and David helped with the set-up and running of the show.

I thoroughly enjoyed my attempt to raise funding for your charity but it was so much work for relatively little money!!!  You certainly have my respect for all the time that you must invest in keeping the charity going.  In hindsight I should have enslaved a few of my friends to help me sell the tickets, as one person will always have a very limited reach – so there is still room for improvement!  With regard to my possible future involvement I would like to suggest that I could include the charity’s publicity cards into all my sales and draw my customers’ attention to ‘Adopt a Potter’ wherever possible.  If this is in your interest I could distribute small stacks of your cards in several local potteries, so your appeal for funding could become a permanent feature on the sales counters of potteries.  Have you ever thought about collection boxes that could be set-up in potteries?  If you have one for me, I would be happy to ask my customers (and people who interrupt my work to ask for directions J!) for donations – I guess I need a sealed box to be legal?  If there is any other way, in which you feel I could be of help to you, just let me know and I will certainly give it some thought!

Claudia