Total underwear collected is 1,089,963

We’ve now hit a MILLION distributed!

What a busy month it’s been. We sorted and organised underwear for 6 organisations, taking our overall distributed total to over a million. And this was as well as dealing with a break-in at our old premises and moving to new premises a week earlier than planned.

For details of where the underwear has gone this month, please have a look at our underwear timeline https://www.smallsforall.org/category/pants-timeline/

Some of you might not know that on Tuesday 11 June I arrived at our warehouse to find we’d been broken into. The place was flooded and ransacked, sadly lots of damage (see http://bit.ly/2wT4Hmd for info).

The start to the day was truly awful. But, thankfully, the world is full of lovely people who cared enough to come together and help move our mountain of underwear to our new premises. I am so very grateful to everyone who helped us out. Firstly, to Colin from CSI Products who went the extra mile and stayed way longer than he should have taking truckloads of underwear to our new premises. To Jordan and Steven of JN Couriers who kindly responded to an SOS on Facebook and came to help with their vans, and also to Alan and Alex from React Transport for coming with lorries with tail lifts. And finally, to our amazing volunteers for making the move possible through their efforts in challenging (cold, dark and very wet!) conditions. Some of our volunteers kindly took much of the soaking wet underwear home to wash and dry which really helped minimise what we lost. I really can’t thank them enough.

Since starting in my garage back in 2010, Smalls has grown exponentially and we’ve reached a stage where we need a permanent base to secure our long-term future. As you may know, we’d been looking for new premises and had been lucky enough to find somewhere; luckier still that our new landlord allowed us to move in a week earlier than planned. Our move, however, brings with it the need to raise funds. And so we’ve launched a special appeal to help raise the £19,000 we need to cover rent, rates and other associated premises costs for a year, and pay for the loss of the generator that was stolen in the break-in. We need to raise this money to ensure we can continue to function and grow in the future, so that we can go on helping more people in need – in both Africa and (from 1 August) the UK.

If you’d like to help, please give to this Wonderful page: http://bit.ly/premisesappeal and Smalls will receive 100% of your donation. Every penny matters.

It will take us a while to get everything organised at our new premises given we weren’t prepared to move on the 11th, but we’re working hard to get back to business as usual as quickly as possible. The address for donations remains the same for the moment: 108 Buchanan Crescent, Eliburn, Livingston, EH54 7EF. Please remember to pop a note of your email address in with your donation if you’d like us to let you know when it’s been processed, and thanks in advance for your patience in receiving an acknowledgement. We’ll finish opening donations received in April this week and will start May next week.

Maria