To celebrate International Women’s Day on 8 March 2025 the club has been collecting toiletries to donate to My Sisters’ House.  Pauline dropped in at their Chichester base earlier in the week, and more donations have been collected at our business meeting, to be delivered over the weekend. We are happy to continue to support this charity, after we donated £50 as part of our 50th anniversary celebrations last year.  They support women in difficulty or crisis.  They work with you to improve your welfare and wellbeing, reduce your risk of domestic abuse and support your recovery, and help you reach your goals for employment, education or training.  Their services are delivered by women, for women.

The club sent a team to support the local Rotary club Quiz, held to raise funds for The Lockswood Care + Wellbeing Centre (Age Concern), and to subsidise charity users of The Wheel House, Hillhead, like us. The team started well, and was winning after 4 rounds… …but unfortunately the music song words and obscure general knowledge rounds knocked them down to 4th out of 11 teams! Never mind, and well played!

We celebrated the lunar Year of the Snake a little after the actual day, which was on 29 January.  Members of the club met for a meal at the local restaurant offering Asian flavours to brighten your winter.  It certainly did that! Ros even came suitably adorned with a snake pendant; happy Chinese New Year to us all.

A past member of our club was a leading light in Bishops Waltham in Bloom, and was remembered by the Quiz organisers as they celebrated the 15th year of the quiz.  We field a team in memory of Pam, and this year had two team tables.  The event is well supported, with a total of 27 teams this year.  We came 11th and 19th, which is lower than previously, but it’s the taking part that counts!

As a club, we have chosen to support Children on the Edge as our charity for the coming year.  We recently sent them the money we raised from the club BBQ earlier in the year, supplemented by money from other events.  This was timed to coincide with The Big Give 2024, and our donation was therefore doubled up. We have now received an email thank you from Eloise Armstrong, Fundraising Manager at Children on the Edge.  She expressed how grateful they are for our support, and how delighted they were that our gift of £1,000 could be doubled – and turned into £2,000 to Children on the Edge. This can help provide a safe space for 16 children to learn and thrive for a whole year in 2025. She included a short video and message from their CEO Rachel Bentley, marking the impact of our

We have been celebrating our club anniversary by nominating 50 charities for a donation of £50 from the Charles Jacob Charitable Trust.  Each day, for the 50 days since the anniversary of our charter on 4 May, we have put up a Facebook post about one of our nominated charities, in a random order. We hope that our donation of £50 is useful to the charity for work in the local area, and supports the aim of the Trust to help the disadvantaged.

Our club member Audrey has a natural wombling skill, to find and repurpose all sorts of things (and for those that don’t remember the childrens’ TV show characters, Madame Cholet is a very kind-hearted but short-tempered female Womble, and the cook of the Wimbledon burrow, styled on Beresford’s mother and named after the town of Cholet in France. She affects a French accent, though she is actually no more French than any other Wimbledon Womble and simply likes to think of herself as French.  https://wombles.fandom.com/wiki/Madame_Cholet ) Audrey came across a social media post from a local care home, offering some adult diapers that they had spare, for anyone to collect.  As it happens, at our regional meeting last weekend, the speaker was Jane Walker, founder and CEO of Purple Community Fund.  She had requested ring pulls, toiletries and adult diapers!  So, we collected them, took

Our congratulations go to club member Ros Hardiman, who has been inducted into the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2024.  The ceremony was held in Cancún Mexico on 18 May. She came home with a certificate, a sash and a plaque!  At the celebration dinner she had to give a speech to thank the people who had helped her during her swimming career – a bit like the Oscars! Ros says: It is a great honour to be nominated, there were thirteen successful nominees this year. I was the only British swimmer, the other Briton was recognised for his coaching and administrative contributions to the sport. I was determined to accept the award in person although Cancún would not normally be my resort of choice.  It caters for a young clientele, either for the beach bar/ night club

In the spirit of ‘Hanami’ – the Japanese celebration that literally means “flower viewing”, but commonly refers to cherry blossom viewing – members of the club visited our 3 cherry trees at Lee-on-the-Solent Recreation Ground.  We had arranged for them to be planted by Gosport Council in 2021, to celebrate the centenary of Soroptimist International.  They were accompanied by a plaque, also stating that the trees were in memory of past club members.  All trees are coming into bloom and looking healthy.

At each club meeting the tin is put round to collect any small silver change for the Barbara Watts Volunteering in Pretoria project.  We use the same tin every time, which (at great personal cost) was emptied of the double dipped chocolate almonds! The project was born out of the Friendship Link between SI Southern England (region) and SI South Africa, and has been running for a number of years. We are currently supporting a young woman called Leah, covering her living and working expenses.  She is from a township, and had just graduated as a qualified social worker, but her skills would have been lost without this opportunity.  In her work at Pretoria Psychologists she is improving her understanding of mental health issues and developing programmes to deliver support to those who suffer from these debilitating illnesses, particularly within the townships.  She has brought