Last Friday evening, we were delighted to welcome Mrs. Vivienne Noyes-Thomas to the IC. Vivienne became involved in the charity Christel House when she retired from full-time work and she now spends much of her time giving presentations about the work of the charity to potential and current fund-raisers. Throughout each year at the IC, we build up a fund from various House events and donations and the students choose where to send this money. This year, we managed to collect £400 and Tom Graber proposed Christel House, a charity setting up schools and running education programmes for underprivileged children around the world, and one with which Tom’s family have long had connections. This was the first time that we have been able to present the cheque in person and to hear at first hand how the money will help our chosen charity and we very much enjoyed Vivienne’s slide show and talk, many of the IC students contributing interesting and challenging questions. Following the main presentation, Vivienne also showed photos of her fund-raising ascent to Everest’s base camp.
Academic excellence is, as with Sevenoaks School, a key goal in what this charity sets out to achieve – the difference is, of course, as Vivienne remarked, an accident of birth. We hope that we can continue our association with this very worthwhile cause and Tom is already thinking about some ideas for fund-raising events next term.
For those of you interested to read more about Christel House, the website is: www.christelhouse.org
If anyone would like to contact Vivienne directly, please email me at ec@sevenoaksschool.org

An attentive audience

(Gualti is blinking, not asleep!):                                  The Everest slides:

Tom presents the cheque to Vivienne: