A local Gym owner has launched a campaign to ‘Bring A Bit Of Christmas Cheer’ to Swindon familes this Christmas, which calls for people to donate gifts and bring a smile to families less fortunate this Christmas.
James Aghabi co-owner of Alpha Boxing & Fitness aims to brighten up people’s lives, and is appealing for Swindonians and Swindon companies to donate anything they can to help put a smile on others faces this festive time through a social media group and website.
Organiser James Aghabi said: “This all started with me Christmas shopping online for my kids and I looked at some of the prices involved for the things they’ve asked for this year and realised that I’m a very lucky man to be in a position to get my kids what they want for Christmas..
“After chatting to a couple of friends I decided I wanted to pay forward the luck I’ve had over the last few years and give something to people that aren’t able to have a worry free Christmas period due to the economic crisis we’re in, maybe can’t even do a food shop or a very minimal one anyway.
“I know we’re not able to help everyone but I wanted to start with the local Swindon community, so I set up the ‘Bringing A Bit Of Christmas Cheer’ page on Facebook
“If you can donate anything to our campaign, you will be bringing a smile to the face of a Swindonian family this Christmas!”
Within 20 minutes of the Facebook group going live, donations from James himself, Jason Ranford of JR Transport, Callum Knowles of Photos by CWK and Danny Kimber of Responsive Personnel had totalled £2000 in gift vouchers and some Christmas themed photo shoots.
Happy with the donations received to kickstart the campaign James said “It’s a fantastic start but the more offers we receive, the more we can give back to the community”
Hi James. I run the Swindon Christmas toy appeal. We have written to every church, school and agency in Swindon with a referral form for them to fill in with the names, ages children and likes, dislikes of families who are going to struggle to give presents to their children or would end up resorting to loans. We have 80 chikdren referred already and its only just gone out. Last year we gave 2/3 main presents, a soft toy, a book and a stocking filler to 353 children. We will be collating the presents on the 11 th to quarantine them to start sorting and choosing and wrapping presents ready to deliver them wc 14 December. If you wanted to join up forces that week, we are likely to have the names of about 400 children referred by social workers etc by then. Regards Dawn toyappeal@gcswindon.org.uk
I could help with wrapping