Rosedale’s 20th Anniversary, raising funds for Guide Dogs for the Blind and Anne’s Santiago de Compostella pilgrimage

We chose Guide Dogs for the Blind as our charity of the year for Rosedale’s 20th anniversary. We set the target of raising £2,500 so that we could choose the name of a puppy, and make a lasting difference. We have already passed this initial target, but we are pressing on to see if we might possibly double it, which would mean we could name two puppies and have a Rose and a Dale!

Events during the year have been incredibly varied, starting off with a theme of walking with some of the staff completing a 20 mile walk over the Easter weekend. Anne and Simon used this as a training walk for their longer walking challenges – Simon completed a 100km challenge over two days and Anne completed a pilgrimage across Spain following the Way of St James to Santiago de Compostella.

During June we hosted the last of our series of writing workshops hosted by Lewis Buxton which was incredibly moving as always, with some beautiful pieces of work around grief being created.

Fundraising events have also included a line dancing evening hosted by Funeral Director Paul Blake and one of our ever-popular bingo nights in Halesworth. Although many of our events are attended by people that we have carried out funerals for, we always have fun, but in what feels like a safe environment where they feel they are among friends.

On a more serious note, the disturbing discovery of the way that a funeral home in Hull was being operated has sent shock waves across the country and the funeral profession as a whole has turned its focus onto making sure that this can never happen again. Our Director of Operations Emily Houghton has been appointed by the National Association of Funeral Directors to champion quality and standards across Norfolk and Suffolk and she has invested huge amounts of time into supporting the local councils to understand how funeral homes operate and to help them create a blueprint for how standards can be audited across our counties. We are always pleased to be involved in setting standards and raising the bar to ensure that the bereaved are supported and the deceased is cared for in the best ways possible.

As we pass the longest day our thoughts turn to our grief tending events which we are preparing for and which include pebble painting and lantern and memory making workshops. We are hosting a performance at the Corn Hall which has been hailed as a “monumental step towards including death in our conversations” and is called the End of the Road Show. It’s an interactive performance about death and dying blending storytelling, poetry, sound and ritual to create an informative and powerful exploration of end of life planning that is full of warmth, wit and humanity. Our events culminate in the creating of community mandala art on Fair Green and as dusk falls, a lantern walk and candle lighting ceremony followed by the sharing of food and fellowship. For more information on our upcoming events, please click here.