Woking District Rotary Club has been busy agreeing grants for local charities using some of the money raised locally during the last year.

Eikon is a charity working across Surrey, providing youth support practitioners in five secondary schools, one of which is Fullbrook School in Woking. Rotarians were impressed by the work performed by Eikon to provide a service to school students who are struggling with their mental health for any reason, and has stepped in to fill a funding gap in the provision of the service at Fullbrook.

A large donation of £4,000 has been made which will enable students to directly access qualified professional support workers who will listen, talk, and help them with the skills they need to live their best life.  When help is needed, Eikon aims to help early to stop problems from becoming bigger.

The Rotary Club has also answered a call for help from Relate West Surrey. Relate provides counselling services for relationships, families and young people. However, it has struggled to provide the service to people in Woking whose native language is Urdu and who are unable to hold a conversation in English.

Relate needed to train up an Urdu-speaking counsellor but lacked the funds to pay for it. Woking District Rotary stepped in and provided £4,000 to enable it to do so. Relate is now progressing the initiative, by identifying a suitable volunteer within the local community in Woking, and then arranging a suitable training package.

Two smaller donations were also made to local charities for specific activities, with £1,000 given to The Lighthouse. With the money, the charity will be able to host a Christmas Day celebration for those who would otherwise be alone and provide toy vouchers to brighten the morning for children and families in need.

In addition, it will be able to distribute food hampers to families with little or nothing this festive season, ensuring that they too can share in the joy of a warm meal and special treats.

The other £1,000 grant has gone to Cherry Trees, a charity based in East Clandon, which provides home from home care for children in the area who have complex disabilities. The grant is to enable it to provide a seaside day out for children under its care.

Gill Colbeck, who heads up the community team at Woking District Rotary Club, said: “We take great pride in our careful research which enables us to ensure that grants we make to local organisations are always going to be used effectively and for the purpose they were intended.

“This latest package of donations totals £10,000, and is only possible thanks to the generosity of Woking’s residents who support our fund-raising events. This series of grants completes a cycle we started after the very successful Fireworks Extravaganza in 2023.

“We have just held another extremely successful Extravaganza in Woking Park, and the surplus raised from this will enable us to continue our work for another year.”