2025 newsletter No. 3

30 June 2025

Dear Wonderful Friends of King’s Volunteers

Wow – what a few months we have had – spring has morphed into summer and the fans in the Shop are flying off the shelves!

Once again, a huge and heartfelt THANK YOU to you all for your continued dedication to the Friends of King’s. I know the weather has been oppressive and the aircon in the Shop has been occasionally patchy, so thank you for continuing to make the effort to come in and help our mission!

Thanks to all our efforts, the Friends Shop’s success has continued into the second quarter of the year, with revenue remaining up 20% on the same six-month period in 2024. Customer feedback stays close to our hearts, with new additions to our shelves including lint rollers, breast pads, sketching pencils, Tena pants and more to come.

The anticipated Friends’s merchandise expansion has begun, with pin badges and trolley keyrings arriving, and with an order for hoodies with our lovely new logo just having been placed. I think we will need baseball caps and sunglasses too at this rate! We continue to approach suppliers for discounts beyond their standard wholesale rates, and we are also looking for excellent quality end of line items that we think will suit the hospital community, to help drive up our profits.

With our unrestricted funds (i.e. funds that are not already committed to a project or team), the Friends have agreed to make a significant and exciting grant in the last few weeks – the purchase of a second RITA machine for the Dementia & Delirium Team for nearly £6,000. The Friends purchased one RITA last year following an impressive presentation at our 2024 AGM and having heard about its successes the Committee have agreed to invest in a second.

Beyond our bread and butter of running the Hospital Shop seven days a week and making grants to the King’s community, one of the trustees’ key objectives for the year was to launch a new website, both to enable new members to sign up easily, and also to allow King’s staff to apply for grants online, without having to fill in endless paper forms. Very pleasingly we launched this a few weeks ago. A huge thanks to Jane for working out how to do this with seeming ease!

A very big thank you once again from me and all the trustees (as well as Ana, Jane, and Hannah) for all you do to help us achieve this day in day out. As I said last time, we do not under-appreciate the amount of work it takes to keep a Shop such as ours full and open, and every minute you spend helping us helps the wider Friends team do more for the wonderful King’s community that we are here to serve.

Jo Lloyd

Chair, Friends of King’s College Hospital