At MSP we’re passionate about the community we live and work in; we’re always looking for ways that we can make a positive change within it.
Dorset plays home to many of the nation’s charities and we’ve chosen to make Julia’s House our main local charity of choice. Since making this decision a few years ago, we’ve thrown ourselves fully into supporting them wherever possible.
Why Julia’s house
All the staff at Julia’s House are passionate about their work and role within the families that they care for. They provide practical and emotional support for families caring for a child with a life-limiting or life-threatening condition, providing frequent and regular support in their own homes, in the community or at their hospices. It’s such a special place, it can’t help but stay in the forefront of your mind.
Their mission is to set the gold standard in flexible, bespoke care that supports the whole family to access the help they need, when and where they need it and for every member of the family to feel supported, valued, cherished.
However they don’t stop there
As well as their care work, Julia’s House are a voice for change to improve funding for families with life-limited children. Julia’s House has led on two national research projects – looking at how crucial respite care is in the prevention of relationship breakdown and its role in mental wellbeing, using these results to lobby parliament in partnership with Together For Short Lives.
Their multiple award-winning care is also a model for new and developing hospices across the globe who are looking to emulate their outstanding service. Julia’s House mentors two children’s palliative care charities in the USA: Ladybug House in Seattle and Asher’s Smile in Florida.
We’re so incredibly proud to have them on our doorstep.
As well as seeing their dedication to their mission, it was important to us to choose a charity that reflected our love for the outdoors and making each day fun with activities. Julia’s House fitted the bill perfectly. Scan over the ‘future events’ area of their website and you’ll see that most of the calendar is booked up with cycles, runs, walks, and swims.
In true MSP style, we’ve put our own spin on it. So far we’ve organised three events that have seen the entire MSP team come together and give their all to raise money for this lovely charity.
Our first internal team event was a cycling challenge that we set up in the office to pedal the distance of Dorset to Scotland. Every team member got involved, with people staying late or coming in early to ensure we completed it in our goal time.
For our second internal team event, we decided to set ourselves the challenge of walking the distance from Dorset to Iceland. It’s no mean feat as it actually equates to 1 million steps and 1137 miles.
To help spread the word of Julia’s House beyond the corners of Dorset, MSP hosted a client networking day, our highly anticipated Cheltenham Charity Race Day. As our first big event, we didn’t know how it would turn out, yet in the end, it was deemed a huge success, and the glowing feedback we received from our clients that attended, still gets spoken of today. It’s an event that we would certainly like to repeat as it enabled our clients to meet all the MSP team and not just the ones they deal with on a daily basis as well as raising important funds and awareness for Julia’s House.
“My personal achievement was cycling 85 miles in the first challenge despite not being on a bike for about 20 years! This year walking over 100 miles in 10 days and still being able to move on day 11 as a result was pretty good. Overriding all this, of course, was the end goal of raising money for a great local cause.”
Chris Sheppard, MSP Business Relationship Manager
So far we’re thrilled to have raised as much as we have for Julia’s House, and can’t wait to raise more.
It’s always lovely to feel appreciated so we were thrilled to hear from Caroline Attreed, Corporate Fundraiser for Julia’s House, who said:
“Julia’s House would like to extend its thanks to everyone at MSP Capital for making us your chosen charity. All of your brilliant fundraising activities will continue to make such a difference to the local families we care for. We simply couldn’t do this without the support of businesses and people like you.”
We know as our team grows we need to set challenges with even more miles and steps – but we’re ready to give it our all …
If you’re keen to support Julia’s House and the tireless work they do every day, click here and find out all about how you can get involved. Every pound makes a difference to the children and the families being cared for.
