Fundraising for a person

tomd50002 · 14 April 2016 at 12:11PM

Hi there my son was diagnosed with a brain tumour in January and has recently had a bleed to the tumour, which he has recovered from but has left him paralysed on one side. He has just got home after 7 weeks in a hospice where he was given end of life care.

While he was in the hospice we have raised over £8000 with gift aid, which has been donated to 3 charities.

Ive been asked by quite a few people now, If we are going to set up a charity for my son, to enable us to buy all the expensive equipment that he will need to make his life alot easier.

Ive done a bit of research about starting a charity and from what ive read, seams quite tricky.
I dont know if there is any other way for raising the money, or any other way that will facilitate others to donate money and equipment to him.

Any help on this matter is much appreciated

Ms_Dee · 14 April 2016 at 6:06PM

I'm sorry to hear that your son hasn't been well.
Well done for raising money for multiple charities.

There are a couple of suggestions you could use, instead of setting up a charity.

Many people set up social media pages or post on their local Facebook selling pages/groups people are often more than willing to help or donate things, even if it is things you might be able to sell on to raise money or items you may need.

I think your best option would be to set up a 'Crowd funding' via a site like Just Giving. It is a page where you can raise money for a personal cause and people can donate that way.

From their website:

Help a family member, friends, children, pets or a community in a time of need

Start crowdfunding
You receive the donations to spend on your cause

You can create an account easily with Just Giving or even log in via Facebook if preferred.
> Just log in http://www.justgiving.com,
> Select 'start fundraising' at the top of the screen,
> Click 'Start crowdfunding'
> Fill in the details of how much you would like to raise and why.

Then share with family, friends, social media and other ways, people can donate directly through to your crowdfunding page.

Good Luck and I hope you are able to raise the money you need and get the help you need, best of luck!

Topcat1982 · 15 April 2016 at 9:26PM

There's no point setting up a charity for one person - too many costs involved.

You can go through an existing registered charity or ask for donations directly through one of those pages.

Savvy_Sue · 18 April 2016 at 7:41PM

Topcat1982 wrote: »

There's no point setting up a charity for one person - too many costs involved.

Not just no point, not possible.

Topcat1982 wrote: »

You can go through an existing registered charity or ask for donations directly through one of those pages.

Agree, if there is a charity 'specialising' in that type of brain tumour, start there. Raise funds for them, ask what support they can give you, and so on. Otherwise I know there are several brain tumour charities, or general cancer ones.

Melv69 · 8 August 2016 at 8:36PM

Apologies if this should have been a new post, but I think it has a strong connection to this thread. A Crowdfunding site was set up by some friends of my brother in an attempt to raise sufficient funds for stem cell treatment for MS, a treatment he is unable to get on the NHS as he doesn't fall within the criteria for the current trials. The initial site raised over £10k and since then there have been several fundraising activities, with the total now at over £20k. The current 'treasurer' wants to step down and I am happy to help, but what is the best type of account to use for such a purpose ,and are there any tax implications based on whose name the account is held in? We still need to raise another £20k to have enough to send him abroad for affordable treatment, so we're talking about quite a large sum of money. Any advice out there would be greatly appreciated.

Savvy_Sue · 9 August 2016 at 1:07AM

What sort of account are they using at the moment, and is there a problem with it?

If the account is a personal one, then there are tax implications on the interest, also if anything happened to the account holders and they needed to claim benefits or were getting divorced or things like that, the account would 'belong' to them.

However, over the years I've known a number of non-personal accounts be set up: the house where DH used to live had a 'house account'; several of the places my sons have lived in have had 'house accounts'. There it's clear that the money doesn't belong to any one of them.

So, given that it's likely you're going to be paying in cash from time to time (from the fundraising events), I'd go round the banks which are easy to get to and which will accept cash over the counter, and ask how you'd set up an account with an appropriate name.

It might be worth agreeing a few rules: setting up a small committee, working out what you'd do with the money if more was raised than needed or for some reason your brother couldn't travel for the treatment - passing the money to a charity researching MS would seem the obvious choice, of course!

Melv69 · 9 August 2016 at 6:21AM

Thank you, it's in a personal eSaver account currently which means it gets a bit of interest too which is good. It's important that others can make donations straight into the account but I guess that's possible with most accounts these days. I'm going into the bank on Saturday so I'll have a chat with them and seen what they say. Thanks so much for your advice

Fundraising for a person

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