Richard Drax MP Chooses Safe In Sussex for £1k Donation

Richard Drax, MP for South Dorset, has nominated The Lantern Trust, a charity offering help and support to local people, to receive £1,000 donated by the trade body bacta, which represents seaside arcades, piers and related attractions.

 

He says, “I am absolutely delighted that the Lantern Trust was selected as a worthy and effective recipient of this generous donation of £1,000 and can I thank the donor, bacta, for giving me the chance to nominate them in the first place.

“Like many of our coastal resorts, Weymouth and Portland have their share of deprivation and poverty, and the Trust, under the leadership of Mike Graham, works wonders to change people’s lives by providing practical, emotional and personal aftercare needs to break the cycles of dependency and disadvantage. And never has this work been more significant than during this pandemic and consequential lock-down.”

Mike Graham, Chief Executive Officer at The Lantern Trust says, “We currently have our teams still working on the front line supporting vulnerable people whom have been accommodated to sustain their tenancies. The pandemic brought about a situation which needed all local statutory and non-statutory services to work together to ensure all rough sleepers were accommodated and support offered. My teams are in daily contact with our clients and face to face is still occurring where essential and keeping to all the social distancing measures. The £1,000 will go into our COVID-19 emergency response fund including food parcels and other essential items needed to help our clients through these most testing of times. We are very grateful to bacta and its members for their kind donation and to Richard Drax, MP for nominating us.”

Bacta launched its Siding With the Seaside (#sidingwiththeseaside) campaign last year in order to support the seaside communities served by their members and to highlight the lack of government investment that threatens the precious heritage in many seaside towns.

Bacta CEO John White says, “The situation was already serious for many seaside towns whose communities have suffered through lack of employment and local investment. However, when we went into lockdown just before the Easter holidays, the position became far more serious as local businesses were forced to shut and the seasonal trade, which is so vital, was lost. Our members made a total of £23,000 available to give to seaside charities via the MPs who we have got to know through our seaside campaigning work and who are best placed to know who would benefit most.”

 

ENDS

 

Editor information:

About bacta:

Bacta represents the owners and operators of seaside amusement arcades, over-18 amusement centres, and the companies that hire machines to pubs, clubs, bowling alleys, bingo halls and similar venues.  It also represents the manufacturers and distributors of all types of amusement equipment.  This can range from children’s rides, to jukeboxes, fruit machines in pubs and clubs, crane grabbers, penny falls, tuppeny nudgers, test your strength machines, videos, pool tables and gaming machines

www.bacta.org.uk

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