Chris Allison served as the Executive Foundation Director for many years and, prior to coming to Cranleigh, was a trustee for the Lord Wandsworth College Foundation. In 2020 Chris joined the Cranleigh Foundation board as a trustee. With her wealth of experience of working with the Foundation, Chris shares her unique insight into how the Foundation supports children, their families and carers.
These days we are usually given the opportunity to help others via a post on our Facebook page asking us to sponsor a friend who is undertaking some kind of marathon challenge or similar. It is hard to resist such pleas but I know I often think to myself ‘well, just one more’ and press the donate button. I hope that my £10, plus Gift Aid, makes a difference somewhere, although giving to big fundraising organisation can be a little impersonal.
Of course, I am probably doing it to motivate whoever is putting themselves through ‘misery’ on a cold March morning by running through the mud on the old railway line, and the cause, which is obviously important to them, is possibly less so to me.
What the Cranleigh Foundation (and before that the Lord Wandsworth Foundation) has allowed me to do is to see the effects of your giving directly on those who benefit from it and this has been something immensely special over 35 years of teaching young people. It is also why I have remained involved in the Cranleigh Foundation as a trustee.
No-one has a completely smooth passage through the peaks and troughs of what life can throw at us, but when the lows come most of us have a family network around us who can pick us up and help us carry on. For the young people our Foundation supports, this is the missing piece of their puzzle. Often as a result of unimaginable trauma, they have lost their safety net, and if the Cranleigh family can step in and help just a few of them navigate their way back to some semblance of normality then that is something very special.
If you are reading this you probably have a child at Cranleigh, or have been to Cranleigh, and know what a special place it is. If we can offer this experience to a young person whose life otherwise might drift on a very different course, then why wouldn’t we?
For me this is what being part of a Foundation like Cranleigh is all about, but let me also say, the young people we help are often hugely influential on the lives of those around them. Your son or daughter may well have a tale to tell in that respect.