Each club identifies the needs of its community, then establishes specific projects to address these needs. All SI projects relate to one or more of the six Programme Focus Areas: Economic Empowerment, Environmental Sustainability, Food Security and Healthcare, Learning Opportunities and Violence and Conflict Resolution.
The projects listed below include some of the local and international issues we research and support in SI Solent East:
Current project work:
- Our main effort is now on Are You Safe at Home? This will bring together our previous work on domestic abuse, and form our entry in the regional Programme Action competition in 2023.
- For the International Convention in Dublin in July 2023, we will be presenting on our support for WaterAid up to 2020. Over 3 years we raised £5,000 to support a Water Cycle project in Rwanda, which reached 81,900 school children in Nyamagabe and Bugesera districts with access to clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene.
Ongoing support:
- Contact the Elderly. A tea party for the local (Fareham and Southampton) Contact the Elderly groups is held each summer, usually at Hill Head. The club also funds Christmas presents for the group. One club member is the local organiser for the Fareham and Gosport group, and would welcome any offer of help as a driver once a month or as an hostess once a year.
- Quilts, being made for Project Linus UK, a volunteer organisation that aims to provide a sense of security and comfort to sick and traumatised babies, children and teenagers through the provision of new home made patchwork quilts and knitted/crocheted blankets – with 7 of the target 11 now completed; 15 quilts have also been given to children in the local refuges.
- Gathering (collecting for recycling). We are starting to formalise our recycling and collections as a club, as these now include:
- 5/10/20/50p coins. Raising money for the regional project of Volunteering in Pretoria, to sponsor a young woman in South Africa.
- Food and hygiene products. For the Basics Bank.
- Stamps. Collected from the club to be put towards Hounds for Heroes.
- Milk bottle tops. Collected from the club to be put towards Naomi House.
- Foreign currency. For donation to Hounds for Heroes.
International Project
Since 2019 we are now supporting the new International project, Empowering Girls in Nepal, in association with ChoraChori.
From 2016-2019 we also supported the International Federation’s Meru Women’s Garden Project helping women in a poor part of Kenya to improve their lives and that of their families, and the 2017-19 International President’s Appeal on Women, Water and Leadership.
Other fund-raising
We have held other fund-raising events such as a jacket potato evening, a coffee morning, a BBQ lunch and quiz night. In 2019 we joined with Rotary Club of Meon Valley to run a joint charity quiz night, with profits going to our WaterAid project; we had planned to do the same in May 2020, sharing the profits between Soroptimist and Rotary charities. Previously, a patchwork quilt made by around a dozen club members was raffled at our Federation Conference in Brighton in October 2011 and raised about £600 that was donated to the local Alzheimer’s Society. In 2014-15 we supported the Hampshire Air Ambulance.