~ Winter Appeal for Oldies Club ~

December 2018: Please donate to this year's Winter Appeal here:

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/winterappeal2018 (you'll need to copy and paste or highlight and right click.)

We recently faced the very real possibility of having to close our doors temporarily to the intake of new dogs :-(. It would be devastating to have to do this over the winter period in particular, as we know it could leave dogs in urgent need of help in vulnerable situations during the coldest time of year and, going by our intake over the years, without much needed and often expensive veterinary care.

Update 28 Jan 2018: With just three days remaining until the 'official' end of our Winter Appeal, we have raised a total of £7,790.06, including  direct donations. If anyone can spare some money to help us edge a little closer to our original target, we'd be incredibly grateful. Thank you so very much to those who have already supported our appeal. We couldn't continue our rescue work without you all :-)

Update 23 Dec 2017: Thank you very much for the continuing donations. We have received a further £1,630.56 in direct donations (by cheque, bank transfer etc.) too, since the previous update, taking our current overall total to £5,747.06 :-). We have taken in a number of urgent dogs this week and your support will help us to take care of our oldies in the coming weeks. Your support really does make a difference to dogs' lives.

Update 9 Dec 2017: Thank you very much to those who have already donated. We have also received £325 in direct donations. It would be wonderful if we could play 'catch up' with our fundraising total as we approach Christmas, so please donate whatever you can spare. All donations are very gratefully received. Thank you.

If you've been following our work, you'll already have seen some of the dogs who come into our care, fallen in love with those adorable, sugar-frosted faces and felt glad that Oldies Club was able to help them in their time of need, when there was nowhere else for them to go (other than perhaps somewhere none of us would wish to think about).

We can only continue to help these beautiful and deserving dogs with your financial support though and we are therefore launching our Winter Appeal today and asking for your help.

We have set the target total at £15,000 to be raised over a three-month period, so by the end of January. If we can achieve this target it would be an enormous help towards paying our monthly vet bills over winter, when we have fewer opportunities to attend fundraising events etc. This amount would be life-saving and life changing for some of the dogs that we hope to be able to help during this time, as you will be aware if you have been following our rescue work.

We understand that this may look like a large amount of money, but our vet bills have recently exceeded £15,000 in just one month and they are a huge and ongoing expense. We are hoping to engage the support of as many dog lovers as possible to do this. You can donate from £2 upwards to this fundraising page and we truly would be so grateful for any amount you can give.

We appreciate that some of you will not be in a position to donate and that some may have donated recently. However, we have around 28,000 'likes' for our Facebook page, over 32,000 followers on Twitter and we had 423,000 unique visitors to our website in the year to 14 October 2017, so if a percentage of you were able to spare £2 in the next three months, we could meet our target. Of course larger donations are very welcome too - we just want to demonstrate how much could be achieved by lots of lovely people perhaps sacrificing one shop-bought coffee, for example

We would not wish to see older dogs left out in the cold this winter :-(. Sadly we cannot help every older dog in need, but with your help we can continue our invaluable rescue work and truly make a difference for the dogs who do come into our care. Please help us by donating today and by sharing our appeal with your dog-adoring family, friends, colleagues etc.

Thank you,

The dogs and volunteers at Oldies Club, the little rescue with a big heart.

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving - they'll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they'll send your money directly to the charity. So it's the most efficient way to donate - saving time and cutting costs for the charity.