The Rust Bucket Rally is a charity rally that takes place over 4 days and 3 nights every June. Our teams drive their £1000 cars for 2,500 miles across Europe for our chosen charity.

The Rust Bucket Rally started as a bit of fun for charity with a few friends back in 2014. The idea was simple, buy a car for £500 or less and drive it across Europe for a long weekend to raise money for charity – simple. We started to plan it and found the idea was a popular one from the start – the first year we had 22 cars and raised £22,000!

Since then we’ve not looked back. Each year has brought an increase in teams who want to join the fun and in 2018 we had 40 cars join us, raising just over £40,000… In June 2019 we set off with over 50 cars and raised more than £64,000. Due to the cost of rust buckets increasing, the maximum spend has now been increased to £1000.

We set off early (3am early) on the Friday morning and spend a minimum of 10 hours a day for the next 4 days driving along some of Europe’s most exciting roads.

Each night we stay in a new location to meet up, have dinner (and a few drinks to keep us going) and get a few hours rest all before starting again in the morning. Over the years we’ve driven across mountain ranges, around great lakes, through forests, into capital cities and more. We’ve visited racetracks, car museums, German Bierkellers and Casinos and we’ve seen every weather you can imagine. And, inevitably, we always lose a few teams to breakdowns along the way but typically, whether it’s in the rust bucket they started out in or something else, we all make it back home together to a welcome parade and a well earned beer.

KidsAid is a child-centred charity. We focus on prevention, healing and empowerment for children and families affected by abuse, family breakdown, illness, and bereavement through to anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide.

We take a three-pronged approach to our work with children that includes therapeutic support for the individual child, support for parents or care givers and support for professionals working with children.

Our vision is to safeguard children so that early life trauma does not become a lifelong burden.