event & community support

This year our Charity of the Year is Friends of the Animals, as voted for by Red Funnel colleagues.

Friends of the Animals are an incredible Island-based charity who provide care, treatment and support to animals who are sick, injured, or unwanted. Your generosity allows their dedicated team to give animals a second chance through rescue, rehabilitation and rehoming.

You can donate to Friends of the Animals when you make your next online booking with us, or if you’re not travelling for a while, you can donate via our JustGiving page.

Find out more about everything the charity does and how you can help here.

Dame Ellen MacArthur knows a thing or two about sailing. But at the Ellen MacArthur Cancer Trust, sailing is just the vehicle in which young people who are living through and beyond cancer are inspired to believe in a brighter future.

“Sailing gives everyone the chance to find out what they are capable of alongside others who completely understand what they’ve been through,” says Dame Ellen of her charity.

Even after they are given the all-clear, cancer can impact young people’s lives long into the future. Their mental wellbeing in particular takes a massive hit.

Once their treatment has finished, they are often left with fewer friends and struggle with relationships, their education suffers, they miss out on work experience, and they develop body image issues. Late effects of being diagnosed young include infertility, extreme fatigue, osteoporosis, thyroid problems, and hearing or vision loss.

Through the charity’s sailing and outdoor adventures, young people gain a new sense of purpose and self-worth, rediscover their independence, and feel optimistic about what comes next in life. They realise what they are capable of, stop feeling like ‘the only one’, and their mental wellbeing improves. They start to re-establish their purpose and place in the world and believe in a brighter future.

Red Funnel kindly cover the costs of young people travelling to the Isle of Wight for this life-changing support. In doing so, they help keep these transformational trips free for young people to access.