We’re delighted to announce our company of the month for July is Skipton Building Society!

The Business Partnering – Finance & Strategy team at Skipton Building Society recently completed their fantastic ‘Tokyo or Bust!’ challenge; walking the distance of Skipton to Tokyo, finishing before the start of the Olympics on 23rd July. For the group of 17 colleagues, this totalled over 5km per team member every day for 100 days.

The team raised over £1,000 and enough to fund 15 sessions of children’s talking therapy, helping patients and siblings to process their thoughts, feelings, and emotions and give them the best chance of protecting their mental health.

Simon Clutterbuck, a manager in the Business Partnering team, said, ‘The BPFS team have been supporting Candlelighters for a few years now, but we weren’t able to organise any meaningful fundraising during most of 2020 and the first three months of 2021.’

‘We were really keen to come up with something ‘big’ to show our support post-lockdown and we came up with the idea of covering about 10,000 kilometres in 100 days – walking, running and cycling the distance from our Head Office in Skipton to the centre of Tokyo, timed so that we’d “arrive” for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on 23rd July.

As some of the team weren’t able to take part, the rest of us got our immediate families involved and we all felt we benefited from the extra push to get outdoors and do some exercise! To be honest, it wasn’t easy to keep the momentum going for such a long period, but we tried to give it all a boost every now and then. One of the team ran a couple of fitness sessions for the rest of us via Teams and we also did a couple of video calls at lunchtimes while each member of the team went out for a walk near their own house; it was a really nice way to keep connected outside the normal work meetings, as well as getting the step-count moving in the right direction!

Three of the team managed to average over a 100km a week throughout the challenge, which is really amazing and played a massive part in us reaching our goal with just a few days to spare… and we managed to attract some terrific donations from our friends and families which, when we take the £500 matched funding from Skipton Building Society into account, means we raised a cracking total for Candlelighters.

Learning how that money can be used for the benefit of children and their families who are facing cancer – and knowing that we’ve played a small part in supporting the amazing work of Candlelighters – is the icing on the cake, and we’re all really looking forward to see what our next fundraising events will bring!’

We’d like to say a huge thank you from everyone at Candlelighters to the Skipton Building Society team – we think you are incredible!