How raising money for charity helped our employee wellbeing

At Caboodle, we’ve been fundraising for Birmingham-based charity Cure Leukaemia for almost 2 years now. They’re a wonderful charity who help fund specialist Leukaemia nurses up and down the country while fast-tracking pioneering new treatment. Since we started fundraising at the beginning of 2018, we’ve raised over £15,000 for Cure Leukaemia.

The fact that the funds raised have gone towards such a wonderful cause is without doubt the best part. However, what else is great about fundraising? The positive effects it’s had on our team!

Our fundraisers

Our fundraising events have ranged from charity bake sales to buffets to fitness challenges and more. We’ve rowed for 24 hours, travelled around the world (not literally of course!), cycled from London to Paris, baked cakes, tackled a military-style bootcamp and done loads more to fundraise for Cure Leukaemia.

Each of our challenges and fundraisers have been designed no only to raise as much money as possible but to include as many people at Caboodle while bringing everyone together and helping people push themselves to achieving things they never thought they’d achieve.

How it’s helped us

Through fundraising for Cure Leukaemia, we’ve seen people improve their health and fitness and we’ve also seen people grow on a personal level.

Our 24-hour rowathon challenge was one of our toughest challenges. A team of 10 of us borrowed 2 rowing machines from a local gym and set them up in the atrium of a local supermarket, keeping them going through the night for a full 24 hours. Only 1 of us had done a similar sort of challenge before, so we all had to pull together to support each other! Not only did the challenge bring us all together, it helped all of us who took part realise what we were all capable of from a health and fitness point of view. And on top of all that, we raised over £1,200!

One of our favourite fundraising events is our 80 Days Around the World challenge. We take on this challenge every year and its great fun! Everyone at the company tracks their miles covered for whatever exercise they do, and we total it all up each week. After we’ve totalled up the miles, we see where we’ve got to in the world! We then have a themed charity buffet. Everyone is split into teams and each team competes to see who covers the most miles. After totalling up everyone’s miles each week, we see where in the world we’ve got to!

This challenge brings out teamwork, competitiveness and encourages a healthy amount of activity and exercise! We’ve seen more of the guys and girls at Caboodle heading across to the gym at lunchtime and we’ve seen people from all areas of the business come together in the name of competition! It’s not only brought us all closer together at Caboodle but it’s helped us achieve our health and fitness goals too!

4 of us took on the 2019 London to Paris event! It’s an annual event made up of around 100 people all cycling from London to Paris over 4 days to fundraise for Cure Leukaemia. After months of training, our newfound athletes completed the challenge and raised over £3,500 and they’re still fundraising. They enjoyed it so much that so far around 7 of us have agreed to take part in the 2020 London to Paris event.

All 4 of our keen cyclists who took on the challenge came back to the Caboodle office after the event beaming with pride. It was a truly fantastic achievement and something they’ll never forget. And it was all for charity!

We’d recommend going all out with fundraising to anyone!
Fundraising for charity has been brilliant for us in many ways and we’ll continue to take on crazy challenges and push ourselves to raise as much as possible! It’s not only been brilliant for the wellbeing of our team, but we’ve managed to raise thousands in the process too. As far as we’re concerned, fundraising for charity is an absolute no-brainer for any business!