LYT Newsletter July 2023
Happy July LYT team!
We hope you're all enjoying wonderful Summer holidays, time with family and friends, and days filled with excellent weather. We thought we would send you even more sunshine by giving you an update on all of our latest news - and boy do we have a lot to share with you!
MEET OUR NEW PARTNER, AMAUDO
We are so excited to announce our latest partner for the second half of this year! Amaudo was created over 30 years ago in response to growing numbers of mentally ill people roaming the streets of south east Nigeria. They offer a safe haven, a place for people to heal and be treated with care and dignity, to be helped to face a positive future, rehabilitated, trained in transferable skills to give them the opportunity to provide for themselves and if possible, reunited with their families and communities.
In addition to 2 rehabilitative care homes, Amaudo also provide mobile mental health clinics and have created a new training facility to teach student nurses, church leaders, journalists and community psychiatric nurses in mental health care. Amaudo also run a weekly radio show that is an amazing outreach tool and has a large potential audience reaching across many Nigerian States. It has been a huge success in raising awareness, signposting people to help and getting people to talk about their own mental health, and has been commended by senior Nigerian government officials.
We continue to be absolutely blown away by long working, established projects such as Amaudo doing incredible work under the radar, and that you very likely have never heard of. Amaudo have big future goals, and work on a shoestring budget, and we are so pleased to be teaming up with them over the next 6 months!
Please have a further read on their amazing work here on our website.
OUR LARGEST DONATION PERIOD EVER GIVEN: £51,288
Again and again and again we say to you: thank you.
Let Yourself Trust has never received a single grant. Never received a single donation from a company, or the government, or any other entity. We are 100% supported by you. Our incredible monthly donors, our fantastic folks who donate in the bucket at shows, and those who take leaflets and later donate online. Every 6 months we give the majority of our funding away, and every 6 months we are able to once again support our partners.
And this time we were able to afford our largest support period ever - we donated over £51,000 to four CDDs and to our main partner for the first half of this year, CRIBS. We cannot begin to explain how unbelievably proud of our small army of supporters we are. We hope you are proud to be a part of this team - you are doing amazing, amazing work in the world.
Specifically, we were able to give:
A £6,000 CDD to Camp Jojo in support of their continued growth as they add camps, add availability of bursaries, and look to grow to a second location in the UK
A £6,579 CDD to Running Space to give them a boost in a down financial period for them, as they await pending financial support, continue to run fantastic fundraisers, and continue to grow, including partnering with a group in Kherson, Ukraine, who cannot run outside, but run inside to loud music to drown out the sounds of shelling.
A £4,329 CDD to new partner Forever Friends in Uganda, to support their new Skills Centre
A £1080 CDD to new partner Rainbow Junktion in Leeds, UK to fund their musicians for one year
And finally, a donation of £33,300 to our six month partner, CRIBS. This will fund housing and family living expenses, food, household and educational supplies, and medical costs for 6 months for over 15 pregnant refugee mums and families in Greece.
A RETURN TO PALESTINE
Finally, we are so, so happy that our group of 30 volunteers and 3 musicians were able to finally go on a much anticipated trip to Palestine, after a 3 year delay due to Covid.
You can see many pictures from their trip here on our LYT FB page and LYT Instagram page.
Special thanks to our partners at Amos Trust for their organisation and leadership, and to artists Blair Dunlop and Patrick Jones for their immense contributions of music and poetry during an intense 10 days across Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, Nazareth & more.
We hope this note brings a punch of hope and optimism to your news cycles, as you return to your pool parties, beach walks and ice cream trips.
As always, in gratitude,
Justine, Martyn and the LYT Team
To help AMAUDO via a gift of support, please click here or visit our www.LetYourself.net to donate.