SMP Members The Mamie Martin Fund #Bike2Malawi and raise £7000!
10 August 2021
We are delighted to share the news that The Mamie Martin fund and their inspiring #Bike2Malawi participants have completed the 10,679 miles from Scotland to Malawi - and threw in a victory lap for good measure!
Guest post - The Mamie Martin fund
We’ve biked to Malawi
The idea of biking virtually to Malawi didn’t seem all that odd in the context of Covid-related restrictions. We are so grateful to all the people who engaged with the idea and enthusiastically at that. It was fun and people responded in all sorts of ways, increasing their engagement with us and with our work in Malawi.
We made it to Bandawe, North Malawi with a few days to spare – 10,679 miles. Bandawe was home to Mamie and Jack Martin for most of their time in Malawi. Having arrived we exuberantly undertook a victory lap of Lake Malawi and completed over 1,000 miles on that extra ride. These miles/kms were made up of short, medium and long trips by our Bike2Malawi riders. Everyone will get a certificate, stating their own total. This is not, and never would be, a competition or race and so no comparative data is being made available. Your distances are your achievements. Well done to you all.
- 67 people registered including two children.
- 36, more than half, of those riders were new to the Mamie Martin Fund. This expansion of our supporter base is a real achievement for us and we are delighted to engage with so many new people. Those riders live in Scotland, England, Germany and Ireland, in order of the numbers in each country.
- There were 583 separate logs of distances ridden. These started on the day of the launch and finished after 10 pm on on the final day.
- 11 riders set up fundraising pages and raised £2,207.18 between them, not counting gift aid.
- A further 34 people donated to the VirginMoneyGiving (VMG) fundraising page and several others to the main MMF page; funds donated outside of the VMG page were added to the total showing on the VMG page.
Bike2Malawi has been a huge success in terms of engagement and profile-raising. We have also raised more than £7k, a new record for MMF which is likely to be broken this year by the #Pledge100 team. That success could not have been achieved without the help of Andrea Adden during the planning stage; her managing the numbers once we started was also invaluable. Our launch could not have been professional and effective without the generous help of Jade, Craig and David from the Scotland-Malawi Partnership and the video work done by Richard Robinson.