Starbucks Moor Street

Help us end our 30th anniversary year on a high with a donation of up to £1,000 from the Starbucks #RedCupCheer Campaign! We need you to help us make lots of noise about the amazing work of St Catherine's on social media so that we can be in with a chance of winning one of these generous donations from Starbucks. This year we have been celebrating three decades of providing specialised palliative and end of life care for people in Central Lancashire facing life-shortening conditions. Fundamentally our purpose today remains the same as in 1985 - to help people enjoy of quality of life and, when the time comes, have comfort and dignity in death. Whilst many of the patients we care for have cancer, St Catherine's is here for people facing any kind of life-shortening illness. Other examples include heart failure, motor neurone disease and Parkinson's disease. St Catherine's aims to be there for people ‘when it matters most’ – working with our patients and their loved ones to offer care free of charge which is always tailored to an individual’s needs and promotes choice and independence. We work from our in-patient unit, day therapy unit and outpatient clinics at the hospice, and through our expert team of Clinical Nurse Specialists who work in the community offering care in people’s own homes. It costs around £5m to run the hospice's much-needed services each year. The NHS contributes £1.3 of this, meaning the remaining £3.7m must be raised through charitable support. This is only possible thanks to the wonderful support we receive from our local community. Please get behind us and help us to be there for local people when it really matters most.

Our lunch clubs run on three days a week. Monday is for the housebound people in the area and we bus them to our club for Lunch, Activities and Afternoon Tea. On Wednesday and Thursday we run clubs for the more able who come for lunch. We offer companionship, friendship, good food, exercises, entertainment and a weekly reason to leave their houses to meet friends. Last Summer we ran fifteen outings and hope to expand on this in 2018.. With extra funding we could reach more people and offer more services. We cannot have enough gratitude for our loyal volunteers and would be delighted to award them with a Volunteer event subject to compliance with Covid guidelines. This would be early July to fit in with the program and also enable us to hold this in an outdoor users friendly space.

Build nest boxes for all four bird species (Willow Tit and Swift have specialist boxes). Ten boxes each for Tree Sparrows and Willow Tits and 2 boxes on poles for communities of swifts. The charity Volunteers and university students on placements at Gorse Hill will make the boxes and be involved in erecting and monitoring them. Yellowhammers like the hedges and open heath/meadowland at Gorse Hill so we want to plant more heathland and increase the diversity of plant species in four of our hedges. This is a long term project as the boxes will be monitored and recorded during subsequent breeding seasons with the birds ringed by a qualified bird ringer. It is only through long term recording that we can help stop these rapidly declining bird numbers. The Swift has declined rapidly in recent years partly due to destruction of many of their preferred nesting sites. These new boxes will play swift calls from each box during the breeding season.