Help for Heroes

We understand that the reason people give money to Help for Heroes is to make a real difference to the lives of our wounded men and women.

Most of the donations have come in from ordinary decent people who might never have responded to a service charity before, much of it raised by those people actually doing something.

For example, a staggering £1.35 million was raised by the 300 or so saddle sore riders on our Halfords Help for Heroes Bike Ride and over £1million has come from the readers of The Sunday Times and The Sun. £1.4 Million was raised at Twickenham in a single wonderful day and £1.5 Million was raised at a ball but most donations are small but there are lots of them.

If you have ridden 350 miles, swum the channel, climbed a mountain, rowed the Atlantic, run across a desert, trekked a thousand miles, held a ball, shot a clay pigeon, jumped out of a serviceable aircraft, or filled Twickenham, sold a thousand cakes or done some other amazingly imaginative event to raise some money, you will want to know that your efforts are appreciated.

You don’t want to think that your hard earned cash is sitting in a dusty bank vault waiting for a rainy day; that is clearly not your style and nor is it ours.

We are passionate about helping our wounded servicemen and women and the sooner we can see results, the better. To that end, we will tell you what we are doing with your money and we hope that you will approve of what we do and that it makes you feel good, it does us.

We know that the wounded ‘blokes’ themselves appreciate what you are doing; they tell us so. You are doing a great job, it is needed, and it is making a real difference and is appreciated.

Well done and thank you!

We have allocated the first £6M to our task of helping to provide the new swimming pool and gym complex at DMRC Headley Court. The designs have been submitted to planners and all being well, work should begin in November this year and the complex will be complete in the late autumn of 2009; we can’t wait!

The artist’s impression, together with the ‘fly though’ give a good idea of what the complex will look like but please bear in mind that they are just that, an impression at this stage. As we get more details we will be creating a pool complex page so donors can see the progress.

We are working with an inspirational group of volunteers called Troop Aid who supply goodies to the hospital at Selly Oak to make the wounded patient’s life a little better. With our support Troop Aid are able to greatly increase the quality of products provided within the bags. Every patient who is injured while on active service and goes through Selly Oak will now receive a Grab Bag. This is a very simple idea but it makes a real difference to the moral and comfort of the patient. The bag contains all the ‘nice to haves’ like a t shirt, underwear, socks, washing and shaving kit, or female equivalent, as well as other items like writing paper, a telephone card and memory stick. It also has a letter from a school child wishing the patient a swift recovery... Simple but rather wonderful.

Click here to read more about Grab Bags and make a donation

We are delighted to be able to announce that Help for Heroes has agreed to give Combat Stress, the charity that helps veterans with mental wounds, a grant of £3.5 million. The money, the biggest grant in the history of Combat Stress, will be used to pay for the much needed expansion, modernisation and reorganisation of their specialist treatment centre, Tyrwhitt House in Surrey, in order to accommodate more Veterans including carers and to provide uprated clinical and welfare working space.

Bryn Parry said "This is a difficult subject for many to discuss and particularly hard to fundraise for. H4H were able to do it now and ensure that the centre can get on with their plans immediately and start caring for more of our mentally wounded now rather than wait.

With the increase of tours and the level of mental stress experienced it is vital that we have the facilities to give our boys and girls the best treatment, for their mental wounds as well as their physical."

Toby Elliott for Combat Stress adds:  “I wholeheartedly thank Help for Heroes for this absolutely magnificent donation.  It will enable us to rapidly upgrade Tyrwhitt House to deliver 21st century clinical services to those suffering from the wounds inflicted by 21st century warfare, who deserve the very best.”

Link: Combat Stress

We have been delighted to donate £500K to complete the SSAFA Forces Help ‘Homes from Home’ appeal to provide relative’s houses at Headley Court and Selly Oak. The houses are fully equipped to be a haven for the relatives of the wounded when they visit their loved ones in hospital and as the Controller of SSAFA outlines below, are a place where the patient’s relatives can recharge their batteries and allow them to go back refreshed. It is a great idea by a great charity and we are delighted to be able to help SSAFA Forces Help to complete their appeal.

“SSAFA Forces Help is delighted to receive the generous donation of £500,000 from Help for Heroes. The money is a significant contribution to our ‘Homes from Home’ appeal and will enable us to provide much needed support to our badly injured servicemen and women and their families. We are extremely grateful to everyone who has worked so hard to raise money for Help for Heroes. We can assure them that, through SSAFA Forces Help’s new home near Selly Oak Hospital, it will be used to make a real difference to many lives. Families will soon be able to stay at the home and be close to their loved ones at a time when they are needed most.”
Major General Andrew Cumming, Controller SSAFA Forces Help

The team at Headley Court know how important it is for their patients to get back to doing sporting activities that challenge and get the adrenalin flowing. A new Adaptive Adventure Training Team called Battle Back has been set up to ensure that the wounded get a chance to ‘feel the wind in the face and the sun on the back’. The skiing trip was a great success earlier this year and now plans are afoot to provide a great many more trips to help with rehabilitation and confidence, and moral, building.

We are working closely with Battle Back and will be providing funds as and when they are needed.

We will be laying on some more H4H challenges next year and linking with Battle Back and Headley Court to ensure that we have patients along with us. The intention is that these challenges raise more money but there may be times when we want some of the wounded to come with us who are unable to raise a great deal of sponsorship and in that case we will sponsor them.

Our bike ride proved to everyone that both the civilian and the wounded military riders benefitted by tackling the challenge side by side; we want that to continue.

We are delighted to be able to contribute to this very simple idea. We put £10,000 aside for the Military Liaison Officer’s funds at Selly Oak. That money enables the MLOs to take the patients and their relatives out for a pizza or a curry while they are at Selly Oak and for them to start getting used to being seen in public.

More often than not, the locals, when they realise who the group are, pick up the tab; (thanks Brummies!) The fund is very simple; the MLOs know what their blokes would benefit from, they have the cash, they do it and that is that, simple but very, very effective.

We are looking at a growing number of ways in which we can help further improve the lives of the wounded.

Mark, our ‘Ops Officer’, marathon runner extraordinaire and Friend of the Famous has been taking various Celebs up to visit the wounded at Selly Oak and some of them are now wearing their H4H tie with justifiable pride!

We are studying the how we can help with decompression, the process whereby the servicemen and women have a chance of a holiday, a breather away from the day-to-day reality and we have been delighted to arrange various trips for the wounded and their families. There will be more developments here, so watch this space.

We are talking to various organisations that offer employment opportunities that want to help our wounded. We are talking to the Generals in charge of the wounded about other, exciting bits of kit for Headley Court that would further enhance rehabilitation.

Then, of course, we await the results of the studies that will explain how we and other service charities can help provide a so called ‘one stop shop’ for the wounded, delivering care for life… more about that when we know more.

So, we know how hard you have worked to raise money for the wounded and frankly, we have done a fair bit too, so we want to ensure that every penny we have all brought in is used to support the wounded.

If you can keep it flowing in, we will make sure it goes to the right place and that is to our ‘blokes’.

With many thanks. Keep it coming.

Bryn Parry
Appeal Chairman