Good Causes

Charity shopping bag packers helped raise more than £2,000 for the Haiti Emergency earthquake appeal.

On Saturday, 20 young people from the YMCA based in St Mary's Road, helped shoppers at Tesco in Ealing Broadway by packing their shopping.

A newly appointed specialist nurse is helping the terminally ill decide where to end their final days.

Rebecca Allkins, a Marie Curie Discharge Liaison Nurse, helps patients and families decide the best place to be, with vital practical and emotional back-up to support them in those last months or days.As part of the Gazette and Marie Curie Cancer Care appeal we focus on her role in the Gazette this week. For donations log on to: www.mariecurie.org.uk/ealing.

A novel scheme to get your foot on the property ladder and help restore unsightly empty homes in the borough has been given the go ahead.

In Ealing, there are 1,282 homes which have been vacant for more than 12 months and as part of a new five year empty property strategy, people in need of housing can contribute their skills in exchange for a stake in the property.

Are you running the London Marathon in April and do you live in the borough of Ealing?

If so, why not share your training achievements and challenges with your local paper, The Ealing Gazette?

Ealing Transition along with Patrick Holden, president of the Soil Association, will be holding a talk on the future of agriculture in the UK.

Following the Government's publication of its food strategy, the boom in population and increasing pressure on natural resources, the event will seek to discuss and address how people will feed themselves in the future.

Ealing is set to become a 'biking borough' and will receive £25,000 as part of a 2010 campaign to get people cycling.

Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has teamed up with Transport for London (TfL) to offer 12 London boroughs extra support and help in a bid to encourage people to use the 2.4million 'cycleable' journeys in outer London.

Readers are being asked to rise to the challenge by following in Claire Moss' footsteps to help boost funds for Marie Curie Cancer Care.

Claire, the borough's community fund-raiser has recently returned from her trek along the Great Wall of China, just one of the charity's Rise to the Challenge projects.
She is urging others to take up a challenge and help boost the appeal launched by Marie Curie and the Gazette last year to raise £170,000 to increase nursing care for people with cancer and other terminal illnesses.

A recluse who stabbed a pensioner in the throat and slit his face with a kitchen knife has been jailed for two years.

Alan Giles, of Bloomsbury Close, Ealing, lashed out at a debt-collector, slashing his face and neck before pinning Derek Davis to the floor as blood drained from his wounds.

A popular fundraising event which was cancelled last year due to 'excessive' hall hire costs will now be setting up at a church in Hanwell.

The annual Animal Welfare Bazaar which raises much needed funds as well as giving information and advice to visitors, will be going ahead at Hanwell Methodist Church, Church Road, on Saturday March 6 to the delight of the organisers.

A new collecting bin will be placed outside the YMCA site in St Mary's Road to allow people to drop off their unwanted Christmas gifts and help a charity.

The bin, next to the restaurant, Y two 5, invites people to donate gifts and items which will then be sold at the charity shop at 83, The Broadway, West Ealing, to help house young people at night and help them move on to independent living.