After an £118,500 crowdfunding push and success in a Europe-wide conservation award, the Mend Our Mountains: Make One Million appeal to raise funds for path repair and combat erosion across Britain has climbed past half a million pounds in total, with some of its biggest projects well on the way to being funded.
Thanks to you, it has been a good month for Mend Our Mountains.
Yesterday evening, the second ever national Mend Our Mountains crowdfunding drive came to an end having raised a total of £118,430 from 2,752 supporters.
The ambitious fundraising push, hosted by Crowdfunder, ran for eight weeks and featured all 13 of the projects supported by Mend Our Mountains, as well as a UK-wide fund which will be distributed equally among the projects. The totals raised for each project can be viewed on the crowdfunding homepage here: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/mendourmountains.
We would like to give a huge thanks to everyone who put their hands in their pockets to make a pledge, as well as the volunteers and supporters who did so much to raise awareness and drive fundraising.
The £118,430 total exceeds the £103,832 raised by the first Mend Our Mountains crowdfunding drive in 2016.
An eventful crowdfunding campaign saw volunteer Richard Duckworth undertake his ‘Dirty Dozen’ challenge, which involved walking all the projects featured in the campaign in a single push, Sir Chris Bonington speaking out in support, and Mend Our Mountains attracting coverage in The Guardian, The Times and on BBC Radio.
Half a million
The crowdfunding push was just one part of Mend Our Mountains: Make One Million, a year-long BMC-led appeal to raise up to £1 million to carry out repairs and combat environmentally damaging erosion in wild places across Britain, drawing on a wide range of fundraising sources. Headline sponsorship is generously provided by Cotswold Outdoor and Snow+Rock.
Last week a Mend Our Mountains-supported project, Cut Gate in the Peak District, won €30,000 of funding when it came out on top in a public vote run by the European Outdoor Conservation Association (EOCA). Two other Mend Our Mountains projects, Cader Idris in Snowdonia and Beinn a’ Ghlo in the Cairngorms, are on the EOCA shortlist and could still receive funding in subsequent rounds.
Crowdfunding, coupled with Cut Gate’s EOCA success, means the overall Mend Our Mountains: Make One Million total has climbed past half a million to around £520,000. The appeal will run until March next year and has an overall target of up to £1 million (an estimate of what is required to fully fund all the supported projects.)
Big projects
In further good news, some of the largest, most ambitious projects within the appeal are well on their way to being funded.
Each project within the appeal has its own fundraising target. The effort to repair and futureproof the perennially popular Brown Tongue route on Scafell Pike, for example, has a target of £100,000, of which £85,000 has been raised so far between the BMC and delivery partner Fix the Fells.
In conjunction with the South Downs National Park, more than £90,000 has been raised towards the £120,000 repair of the South Downs Way, while erosion control on the Great Ridge in the Peak District National Park has secured more than £80,000 of its £145,000 target, helped by a £40,000 donation from the Oglesby Charitable Trust and grassroots volunteer efforts.
Following the EOCA vote, the campaign to repair the ‘Bog of Doom’ on Cut Gate, protecting important blanket peat bog in the process, now has around £41,000 of its £70,000 target secured, while Ben Vane in the Loch Lomond & Trossachs National Park has reached around half of its £40,000 target.
Fundraising efforts continue. Watch this space for further updates as more milestones are reached.
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We want to say a big thanks to every BMC member who continues to support us through the Coronavirus crisis.
From weekly Facebook Lives and GB Climbing home training videos, to our access team working to re-open the crags and fight for your mountain access, we couldn’t do it without you.
Did you know that we've just launched a new U27 membership offer for just £1.50 / month? And with full membership from £2.50 / month, it's never been easier to join and support our work:
https://www.thebmc.co.uk/join-the-bmc-for-1-month-U27-membership
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