Help support St Petrocs: Bluefruit Software’s charity of the year

Every year, the Bluefruit Software team decides together on a charity to support for the year. For 2020, Bluefruit Software’s chosen charity is St Petrocs.

There for the people who need them most

St Petrocs have been there for Cornwall’s street homeless community for more than 30 years. Working to end street homelessness in Cornwall, St Petrocs have had their work cut out for them during the pandemic.

During 2020, they’ve worked hard to ensure their essential services can be provided safely and extended their opening hours to help do this.

St Petrocs help single homeless people in Cornwall to access accommodation, support, advice and more. They run Health for Homeless GP clinics in their Truro and Penzance centres, and their Freshfield helpline service offers counselling for drug and alcohol use. Every day, the outreach work of St Petrocs helps incredibly vulnerable people living in Cornwall.  And during the coldest months of the year, St Petrocs offers emergency overnight shelter that helps to keep people out of the cold.

2020 has been tricky

Fundraising has been tough this year, with the national lockdowns introducing new challenges for St Petrocs. Their most prominent fundraising activities have had to change significantly due to the pandemic. St Petrocs held an emergency appeal hosted for free on Cornwall based crowdfunding site Crowdfunder, which has seen £32,000 in donations made so far. In November, their annual Eden Sleep Out turned into a virtual event for the first time. And this year, to ensure the safety of their clients, staff and volunteers, St Petrocs is not running their annual Christmas shoeboxes campaign.

At the start of 2020, the Bluefruit Software Social Guild had big plans forming on all the ways they were going to involve the team in fundraising for St Petrocs. But then the pandemic happened and like St Petrocs we had to rethink our fundraising plans.

Instead of in-person events, the Social Guild came up with the idea to create a calendar featuring photos from an ongoing monthly photo competition run via the company Slack Channel. The calendar went on sale to colleagues this month and over £180 was raised through calendar sales and match funding from Bluefruit Software. There were a number of colleagues across Bluefruit who wanted to donate additional money to St Petrocs so we suggested an optional £10 donation from anyone who wanted to help. So far this has raised an additional £370, including Team Wolf choosing to give their Christmas team allowance to St Petrocs.

Inspired by all the work being done by the Social Guild, our sales and marketing team suggested that this year, instead of doing our usual holiday gift boxes for our clients and friends, Bluefruit should look to donate that budget to St Petrocs. This has given a £1000 boost to the Social Guild’s fundraising efforts and means that this year, Bluefruit Software have donated £1600 to St Petrocs so that they can continue helping our local community.

Donate now

We’ve got the ball rolling, but St Petrocs still need all the help they can get. We would love it if all of you could join our team in making a donation this December. Even £10 could make a massive difference to some of the most vulnerable people in our community.

If you’d like to help St Petrocs end street homelessness in Cornwall, please head on over to St Petrocs’ Localgiving page and donate.

Happy Holidays!

We’d like to wish all our colleagues, clients and friends Happy Holidays.

Reminder: Bluefruit Software’s offices will be closed from 1pm GMT on 24 December 2020 and will reopen again from 9am GMT on 4 January 2021.