I haven’t just been involved with large charitable organisations, I have also helped set up several smaller groups who are no less important to the people they help.
Cluster headache is a rare a little understood neurological condition. GP’s and even most neurologists had little experience of it and there was no effective treatment. My wife is a sufferer. In 2001 along with a few other sufferers we set up and funded a charity -OUCH- the organisation for understanding cluster headaches. We started a newsletter; set up a help line; mailed information to 30,000 UK GP’s and organised a national conference. Since then treatment has improved and cluster headache is far better understood. OUCH played a key part in that and continues to be run today by volunteers 🌻
Another voluntary group I helped get started was Cheylesmore Good Neighbours in Coventry. I only offered encouragement and a small amount of support, a group of volunteers in the local community did and continue to do all their great work. 🌻 There are several posts on the things they do, which you can read about by clicking in the Tag Cloud.
The Good Neighbours theme was taken up by the “Hope” project in Coventry. A small grant I gave to them to employ a fundraiser has significantly improved their core funding to continue their work in the community. 🌻
Small groups like the ones above are often hard to get started and even harder to keep going. They often compete for funding and attention with much larger and better resourced charities.
Perhaps this business card can help?
GrumbleSmiles 
ooh AHH? I have read this piecewith interest, and Just wonder? as I collect my thoughts!
Old age and the effect of bodily ailments have upon the brain, mainly slowly and the sufferer with out realising it, may not have a a future with a quality of life, that they enjoyed as a younger person.
My reasoning goes into the AI and artificial-Intelligence of the web and its expressions on life cycles. Here lies a problem or problems, as I creep over the 75/80 age barrier, I revert to meeting a person, a smile, hand sake and a chatter of life gone by, with my experiences. I cannot relate to website gossip and AI, and i feel it impersonal, not only that I have to keep up to modern technology and the ‘;WEB”. My fingers and dexterity with the keyboard and the mouse, I find akward at times and I make fundemental errors within the questions I ask and and the responses I give,
modern life and politics, is all concieved by the eye and the brain, and on the web I have no guidance suh as a smile, or verbal reply, so i get lost these days very easily.
Maybe the term is I am an old ‘GASBAG or windbag’ but hey I am still human and enjoy a friendly natter, Societies such as care home/retirement villages need common areas where the residents and friends can meet and exchange opinions! We are now I feel an aging society and looking after the elderly is a social responsibility for all of us, not just ones family, as they have their responsibilty of their younger generations, and one day they may have to vacate their home[s] in old age to get the social experiences of their own life time, and reflex the views to a human, once their parents have passed on.
WE need in the UK Nation some deep thinking of how to cope with the elderly, who still may have the right and mentallity to reason and vote in parliamentary elections.
Just looking, at the press reflecting upon the TV Radio news about Mr TRump and Mr Blair as a proposal in Isreal and Gaza, Intriguieng.
Is GAZA to become an AMERICAN USA TERRITORY, and how would the relationship of NATO The UK and The EUROPEAN Common Market relate to peace in the middle east. What about RUSSIA? and CHINA in all this turmol.
A view point of todays life
Dear John, and fellow readers of these blogs/comments.
Today Thursday 9th October 2025, I was required to think more of where is the UK going as a nation? I am lost completely, the media was full of the English premier League football, and the possible shutting down/closing certain teams due to financial problems of todays business. There again we are asked to consider the older infirmed less mobile persons and their attendance at a premier league football team, as a fan with the appropriate medical help both mental and physical.
Why I am worried is where are our /is our society heading, it appears to be plain as the nose on one face MONEY, where is it coming from?
My assessment of the UK today is we appear to have lost our centres of manufacturing, where in a town or city persons could go to work meet and discuss and solve the problems of the neighbourhoods. Which is where I believe to relax the workers would go to the local football team or cricket team to relax and their social clubs.
There again we had business enterprenuers who would support housing around their manufacturing towns-ENTERPRENUERS?
Today to my mind and since the onset of covid we have working for home as the norm, the adults in this atmosphere have no social life, contact face to face with their fellow workers, only Their children offspring make to local network of social behaviour at and outside school with their friends, It appears to me that children make the modern society integration, without the leadership of the elder generation, except those with mental and physical problems- I t is not a balance lifestyle.It appears life on a computer is the norm with its reasoning [AI}
There again with working at home the older cities and centres of social groups may now be made up of ethnic groups, whose religious and social beliefs are from societal groups, who may be born British, however not in my mind the old christain values and beliefs of our forefathers.
The trouble is at in my 80;s I am living in the past. Apologies if I have upset you the reader!