Caring Christmas Trees

Steve Redrup and I are travelling back from Edinburgh having experienced first hand the delights of Caring Christmas Trees. This is part of the process to establish whether next year we could run caring christmas trees in South East London as a fundraiser for the Jericho Road Project.

This Edinburgh project raises funds for Bethany Christian Trust, a project I visited on my sabbatical and hence discovered the trees! Basically it works like this, people order their trees (range from 4ft -8ft) online and then pick it up at locations on a Friday evening/Saturday on the two weekends before Christmas. This year Bethany plan to sell 4000 trees and this means appoximately £40K raised to operate their winter shelter. In addition to fundraising other obvious benefits are as follows. Firstly the opportunity for volunteering (for example we met people who have bought trees from CCT for a number of years who this year are giving up 2 hours to volunteer), secondly increasing the awareness of the organisation (in our case the jericho road project and also King's Church) and thirdly it has the potential to increase financial giving and I expect volunteers throughout the year. It is huge fun!

So we have had a very busy 24 hours in Edinburgh, moving trees, counting trees (more difficult than you would imagine!), picking trees, carrying trees to people's cars/local flats. In fact Steve and I have become tree experts.

There are a still a few more steps to go through but hopefully in the first quarter of next year we will be able to confirm that the Jericho Road Project will run caring christmas trees 2009 in London. Maybe you will consider volunteering and buying a caring christmas tree next year!