Two Left Feet, Nice Jacket and £10,000 Raised for Nightingale House Hospice!

What an incredible evening for Nightingale House Hospice, with a staggering £61,000 plus raised at this year's Strictly Nightingales event, including over £10,000 from my own fundraising efforts!

For those unfamiliar, Strictly Nightingales is an bi-annual fundraising event that sees local people swap their day jobs for dancing shoes, taking to the dancefloor to raise vital funds for Nightingale House Hospice in Wrexham.

Whilst not attending myself previously, I was persuaded by my Sales Manager, Jules Robertson, to put myself forward. Quite how she convinced me, I'm still not sure! 😉

Anyone who knows me will know that dancing isn't exactly my forte. And between running businesses, travelling and juggling everything else life throws at me, finding time for dance lessons wasn't particularly high on my agenda, and probably the biggest challenge of the whole process.

But I've always believed that no matter how busy we are, we should make time to give something back. Nightingale House does incredible work supporting patients and families facing life-limiting illnesses, and thankfully I haven’t had personal experience of requiring Nightingale’s services, I have had with the a Hospice in Cheshire, so whilst putting myself well outside my comfort zone, I fully understand the huge undertaking these Hospices fo through and that they truly do need such funds to survive!

So, after around nine lessons since July, I found myself performing a Samba to a Michael Jackson track, alongside my fantastic dance partner Nina, who choreographed the routine and somehow managed to work with my two left feet – and was truly just a pleasure to work with, she understood my tight time schedules, vulnerabilities on the dancing and was generally so accommodating a true professional!

As I stood waiting to go on, I remember thinking, "I'm never going to do this again, so I might as well give them a show!"

And what a show it was! The costumes, atmosphere and support throughout the evening were brilliant. Everyone was up for a laugh, and it was fantastic to see so many people coming together for such a worthwhile cause.

Unfortunately, my dancing wasn't quite enough to take home the trophy (No real surprise there), but I did walk away having raised the highest individual fundraising total, with me hitting over £10,000. A huge thank you to everyone across my LinkedIn network, friends, colleagues and business connections who supported my fundraising campaign. The generosity was genuinely overwhelming.

The real achievement, however, was the collective total raised for Nightingale House Hospice. A phenomenal result and a reminder of what can happen when a community gets behind a good cause.

A massive thank you to the organisers  and special mention to Sara Povey, my very patient dance partner Nina, hosts John & Ben on the night and the judges, plus everyone who donated and, I suppose, Jules for talking me into it, in the first place!

Would I do it again? Eer… absolutely glad I made the time to do it!

Sometimes giving back means giving money, sometimes it means giving your time, and sometimes it means making a complete fool of yourself on a dancefloor. All three are worth it for the right cause.