Pupils regularly support the work of charities with an annual charity week, where a number of events are hosted for pupils and staff. This is supplemented by a number of one-off activities throughout the year which allow pupils to raise further funds or collect much-needed items such as books and coats for their chosen charities. 

The charities which the school supports are chosen by the Charities Committee. They have included St George’s Hospital, Teenage Cancer Trust, The Climate Coalition and Katherine Low Settlement, as well as the school’s charity, The Battersea Rise Trust.

Community and Partnerships
Charities

Christmas Hampers

Each year, pupils in the Lower and Middle schools support the ‘Cheer’ initiative at St Mark’s Church with Christmas donations. Form groups at Emanuel are tasked with sourcing personalised Christmas presents for single-parent families in the local area, including gifts for the parents and children, food stables and tasty festive treats.

Run by a past Emanuel parent, Cheer is a leading ministry for the encouragement, healing and restoration of those who find themselves parenting alone and includes any person who has sole responsibility for the care of a child/children.

Pupils and staff deliver the Christmas hampers to St Mark’s Church on Battersea Rise. Cheer staff sort and deliver the gifts to the families’ homes.

Over the years, Emanuel has donated hundreds of hampers to support families in our local community.

Ace of Clubs and Spires

The Sixth Form commits its Christmas fundraising effort to support the Ace of Clubs.

Ace of Clubs is a day centre for the homeless in Clapham Common and has been supported by the Emanuel Sixth Form and their families every Christmas for the last ten years. The centre is very grateful for our contributions, which are very much needed.

In addition to Sixth Form support, we also donate much-needed clothing including coats, shoes and scarves, as well as food donations. Find out more about Ace of Clubs and their work here: https://aceofclubs.org.uk/

We also actively support Spires, a local charity which works to improve the lives of homeless people in our community. We regularly organise drives for coats, jumpers, trousers and scarves as well as sleeping bags, toiletries and summer clothes. Over the last 12 months we have collected and delivered well over 250 much-needed items.

Find out more about Spires and the work that they do on their website: http://www.spires.org.uk

Duke of Edinburgh

The vast majority of pupils in Year 9 sign up to the Duke of Edinburgh Award which involves volunteering in a wide range of environments, such as charity shops, homes for the elderly, libraries, peer mentoring programmes and many other projects, all of which allow them to contribute to the wider community.

Increasingly, pupils working towards their Awards volunteer at Emanuel’s partner schools and community organisations. For example, pupils volunteer as teaching assistants at local partner schools, sort books at the Children’s Book Project and help coach Flyers Disability Hockey.

Drives for technology, clothes and books

We organise a series of drives for much-needed books, clothes and, more recently, laptops and Chromebooks for our partners.

Books

We donated 4,500 new and gently used books to our partner schools before Christmas 2020. Many children in our partner schools have few, if any, books at home. Book ownership has been directly linked with improved mental health amongst children and a greater propensity to read for pleasure, while reading fluency itself has a significant impact on children’s successful progression through education (Children’s Book Project).

Our book drive is now an annual event. If you have books that you are keen to donate that meet our criteria, please drop them off at the security gate at Emanuel School.

Clothes

Similarly, we organise drives for coats, hats, scarves, shoes, sleeping  bags and other essentials for our homeless charity partners, Spires and Ace of Clubs. We organise these once a term as requested by our partners. These are advertised through a variety of channels including The Emanuel Edit. Emanuel volunteers collect and sort the donations and we deliver them to our partners.

Technology

During the recent school closures, many of our partner school struggled to provide equipment to enable pupils to access online learning. Through the generosity of our parents and community, we were able to provide 250 devices to our partner schools. As Emanuel’s equipment is updated, we ensure that devices in good working order are offered to our partners too.

The demand is still great for laptops and Chromebooks and will continue to be so as more schools incorporate an online component to learning. We are always looking for working equipment which we can rehome. If you or your company is in the process of upgrading equipment, please consider working with us to donate to our partner schools. It makes a huge difference.

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