By Donia Fayers

On Friday the 7th of April, a few employees from our London office were able to volunteer at the Lambeth Palace Open Day, an event that I learned about through our partnership with the Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC).

Amren Gill, Sandeep Sreenivasan, and myself were all able to attend. When we arrived, we met with our liaison Kate Barnard, London Fundraising Manager at the RMHC Evelina House. She provided us with information and assigned us roles. Sandeep was assigned to the tea and coffee station, Amren was serving cakes and sandwiches, and I was assigned to the prosecco bar. We spent the day working our stations and getting to know the team at RMHC, as well as learning about what they do on a daily basis. We also had the opportunity to speak with guests that attended the event, which included folks ranging from families who have spent time at the hospital to volunteers like ourselves who wanted to give back to this amazing charity. Overall, it was a beautiful day and the event was well attended with a total of 394 guests.

After the event, we helped the team pack down and take everything back to the Evelina House. The Evelina House is a brand new RMHC site and opened just last December. This building has over 59 bedrooms and comes as part of Guy's and St. Thomas' National Health Services of England Foundation Trust.

In total, the event raised just shy of £4k which is absolutely amazing and an amount that will enable the RMHC to continue to provide free accommodations for families with sick children in hospital.

This opportunity allowed our team to meet the wonderful caring employees of the RMHC. This included David Bonner, Manager at the Ronald McDonalds House at Moorfields, where we have volunteered in the past. The employees we met were grateful for our time as well as Lighthouse London's donations over the past two years, especially our Holiday Drives for the past two seasons.

In addition to the three of us who volunteered in person, the London office as a whole collected chocolate eggs to deliver to the Evelina House. We were delighted to have such wide participation by the team and enjoyed dropping them off for the families in need. One member of the RMHC team noted, "HONESTLY it was such a HUGE help appreciated by everyone at the Evelina House, you really made a lot of families happy over Easter."

The London office plans to continue volunteer efforts for the RMHC in London and we look forward to more events like these.