Supported Charities

Sponsors of Sudbury Spring 2010 Open Gardens in aid of St Nicholas Hospice
£100 Raffle prize presented

Travel and Leisure Group, sponsors of Sudbury Spring Open Gardens 2010, handed over today the £100 Raffle prize to the winners, Mr & Mrs Garcia from Long Melford.  They were delighted with their prize and that our combined efforts raised £4,500, the best ever for the Hospice.

Maria Mills-Farinas, Managing Director of Travel & Leisure Group and organiser of this event  would like to thank the East Anglian Daily Times, Mercury and Suffolk Free Press who helped with their press releases and photographs and all other businesses in town who contributed their valuable gifts to our super raffle, just the raffle alone made over £700:-

- Mill House Bed and Breakfast, Cross Street, Sudbury
- Thai Pavillion, Friars Street, Sudbury
- The Saracen’s Head, Newton Green
- Select Hair, Friars Street, Sudbury
- The Salt House, Gainsborough Street, Sudbury
- Watsons, Gainsborough Street, Sudbury.

A special thank you to the Mayor of Sudbury who opened the event, and to the Town Hall & Tourist Board for their help and assistance.

The Sudbury Open Gardens event was held this year on Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th of April 2010 and was a huge success. This was perhaps the first weekend with lovely weather for many weeks, if not months. So many people came out to visit the gardens and enjoy the wonderful food and drink, exhibitions and plant sales.

Not only locals this time, we were honoured with 40 visitors from Shenfield Garden Society, who travelled by coach and the ones I talked to just loved it! 600 Programmes were sold by lunchtime on Sunday, so we had to improvise and copied maps along with a small description and these all sold as well.

The town was in great activity, particularly on Sunday. Groups of people walking up and down with a programme in their hands, or just a map if they had left it too late.

The Mayor & Mayoress with Organiser Maria Mills-Farinas, Peter Mills and fundraiser Ian Norris	St Nicholas Hospice fundraiser, Ian Norris	Sudbury Open Gardens Market Stall on Market Hill, Sudbury	Visitors enjoying Mill House garden

At Mill House, around 2pm our 8 tables and about 30 chairs on the lawn were all taken with guests enjoying their cheese and wine, and many more standing up.

The joint work of the organiser, her volunteers, the Hospice shop and the 700 visitors just made it the most successful event.

A big thank you to everyone for supporting St Nicholas Hospice!

Travel & Leisure Group has supported our local hospice and organises the Sudbury Open Gardens every year around June time to raise funds. In 2008 we raised over £4,000 and most important of all, generate further awareness on what the "modern" Hospice is, what they can do for the terminally ill and now also for their families, offering respite and counselling. Travel & Leisure Group sponsored the Sudbury Open Gardens again in 2009 on 8th June and donated the 1st Raffle prize of £100. Mrs Carolyn Hortop won the prize. Peter Mills & Maria Mills-Farinas, owners of Travel & Leisure Group handing Mrs Hortop the prize winning cheque (seen right). The event was a great success, raising funds for St Nicholas Hospice in excess of £3,700 When so much is happening to our hospitals with shortage of funds and minimum care, to know there is a place where your loved ones will be looked after and cherished at their time of need is, for us, a very worthy cause to work hard for. Visit them at http://www.stnicholashospice.org.uk/

Latest News

Hospice beds set to re-open.

A generous legacy donation and an amazing community fundraising response has enabled St Nicholas' Hospice Care to re-open two beds at it's facility in Bury St Edmunds. "We've also recently been blessed with a large legacy bequeathed to us by a local man, whom the Hospice has supported until he died a few years ago. We are not out of the woods yet, we still need to raise £10,000 a day from the general public." Travel & Leisure Group will be contributing to this with out annual fund raising even the "Sudbury Spring Open Gardens", this year being held on the 17th and 18th April. Over 20 gardens will open to hundreds of visitors, who enjoy not only the beauttiful plants and flowers, but art exhibitions, food and drink, historical books, and much more.

Hospice Joy At Big Lottery Grant

St Nicholas' Hospice Care is celebrating after its community hospice team was awarded £316,545 from the Big Lottery Fund. The massive grant will cover core running costs of the community hospice team, a service which helps patients suffering life threatening illness to receive specialst care in their own homes where possible. Barbara Gale, chief executive of the charity was delighted with the Lottery grant - but warned that it would still be facing a tough year ahead. "But while this grant is so wonderful and welcome, it only equates to less than a month of our annual operating costs of £4.8 million". Sara Betsworth, Big Lottery Fund head of region for the East of England, said, "The death of a loved one is always traumatic so the ongoing support for family members in addition to the dedicated care for terminally ill patients makes this service extremely valuable. I am delighted that BIG can support such a worthwhile cause and that Reaching Communities funding will continue to support worthy causes across the region throughout the New Year."

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Travel and Leisure Group supports the Cinnamon Trust, the National Charity for the elderly and their pets.

A proportion of our profit is given annually to the Trust and our Managing Director has been a volunteer for over fifteen years and personally looks after pets of the ones in need.

Organisations like the Cinnamon Trust bring some light to the lives of the elderly or terminally ill by making it possible for them to still have a loving companion and giving them piece of mind. Visit them at http://www.cinnamon.org.uk

Just have a look at some of the many happy pets we have fostered in recent years at Mill House, part of the Travel & Leisure Group.