This year’s charity partner
LIFT (Low Income Families Together)
LIFT is dedicated to supporting individuals, families, and the wider community through a holistic, whole-family approach inspired by the Key Working model. Their mission is to help families develop new skills, improve their quality of life, and ensure children grow up feeling loved, safe, and respected—empowering everyone to reach their full potential.
By offering a mix of one-to-one support and group activities, LIFT addresses child poverty and promotes wellbeing. Their group sessions include upskilling, cooking on a budget, budgeting, confidence building, and employability training. LIFT follows the Every Child, Every Chance model, focusing on reducing child poverty, enhancing employment and training opportunities, and helping families move forward from hardship.
LIFT’s welcoming base provides a safe space for computer use, form-filling assistance, a cup of tea or coffee, and access to a mobile charging station. Staff are available to offer practical help, emotional support, or to make phone calls on a client’s behalf. Additionally, LIFT maintains a free food-sharing shelf, stocked daily for those in need.
Previous partners
Richmond’s Hope
We raised close to £4000 for Richmond’s Hope across our Autumn 2024 and Spring 2025 sales.
Richmond’s Hope provides support for children and young people aged 4-18 years who have been bereaved. The charity provides a safe space for children to work through their grief both verbally and non verbally, to preserve memories of the person who has died, to explore their feelings, to develop coping strategies and to understand the impact the bereavement has had on their lives.
As everyone’s grief is different, they provide individual programmes of care for each child. Their dedicated team of bereavement workers support children on a one to one basis.
They are also passionate about educating individuals and groups about the language surrounding grief and offer training and interest visits. The training they offer to external organisations aims to raise awareness of young people’s grief and how it affects their lives.
Drake Music Scotland
We raised over £4000 for Drake Music across our Autumn 2023 and Spring 2024 sales.
Drake Music Scotland is the nation’s leading arts organisation providing music making opportunities for people with disabilities. Their expertise in inclusive music technology and specialist teaching methods support people of all ages and a wide range of disabilities to play, learn and compose music independently.
Play Midlothian
They want every child to experience the play they need to thrive.
Their purpose is to enable every child in Midlothian to thrive through play by creating opportunities and removing barriers.
They focus on play because they know how much this benefits children’s health, wellbeing and development. It is important for their lives in the here and now as well as for their future life chances.
Pregnancy and Parents Centre
The Pregnancy and Parents Centre (PPC) is a local, independent charity overseen by a group of voluntary trustees. Staff, facilitators, practitioners and volunteers run the Centre day-to-day.
The PPC believes that supportive networks, a strong sense of community and strong family cohesion are invaluable during the transition from pregnancy to parenthood and beyond. Together, they contribute to positive mental health and wellbeing by increasing confidence and reducing anxiety, isolation and stress.