Fundraising Feasts Raise £2,500

The first of these, which took place in November 2013, combined a Thanksgiving theme with an exciting Malawian twist; the traditional turkey and trimmings sitting alongside Malawian cabbage, rice… and even nsima!

Encouraged by his initial success, a second gourmet extravaganza was planned for the Easter holiday earlier this year – this time with an ‘Italian Feast’ theme and even more guests in attendance. Oli explains, ‘On the night we had 30 mouths to feed which doesn’t seem much of a difference from 22 but I can assure you that it is! We served slow roasted pulled pork that sat in the oven for 11 hours and caused much anxiety amongst the kitchen staff, but ended up tasting brilliant!’ 

Both evenings proved tremendously successful, together raising just under £2,500 in donations for Open Arms.

Oli would like to thank everyone who helped to bring his idea to life, ‘I can’t thank my guests enough for the wonderful support they have shown and I would particularly like to thank all those who made the evenings possible… especially my parents for funding the evenings and supplying a beautiful venue for the pop-ups. I am enormously excited about my trip to Malawi this summer’.

We look forward to welcoming Oli at Open Arms in July, when he will be visiting us along with fellow students from Lancing College to help look after the children. 

If you have a fundraising idea that could support our work, we’d love to hear about it and can even publicise it for you if you’d like us to. Please emailJudith Rudolph to discuss if we can help with your event in any way.