The ElFest charity fundraiser was started in 2018 in memory Ellie Bostel. Ellie passed away in April 2017 at the age of 23 after a short battle with cancer. She spent a month in the Intensive Care and High Dependency Units at Basingstoke Hospital. During her time there they went above and beyond to make sure she was as comfortable as possible and doing everything they could to help her battle the disease. Ellie herself was a strong, determined, caring girl and her family know that she would want to do something to say thank you to all the amazing people that looked after her. Her family therefore decided to start a local family fun day in her memory, bringing all the community together and donating all profits from the event to these units to ensure that they can carry on doing the fantastic work they do for our loved ones and the community.

2019 saw us introduce a new beneficiary of our fundraising efforts! CLIC Sargent are a cancer charity focusing on helping young people and their loved ones battling the disease. The charity offered support to the family when Ellie was moved to Southampton Hospital, providing accommodation for her parents so that they were close by whilst Ellie was still in a fragile state.

Over the past two years we have raised over £9000 and continue to plan to support great local charities in the future!

Given the past couple of years we have had we have decided to introduce a new cause for 2022. This year we will be raising for Hook Infants and Junior Schools as well as our usual charities, Basingstoke Intensive Care & High Dependency Units and CLIC Sargent. Ellie was a local girl, and attended both Hook Infants and Junior Schools growing up. The Bostel family felt that with our community continually growing in size it is really important to make sure these great schools continue to provide the excellent education that both Chloe and Ellie received. This also brings a new venue as the Junior School have kindly agreed to us holding the event in their land!

Here's to an even bigger year in 2022!