Express & Star Business Awards raise £2,800 for Beacon Centre
The Express & Star has presented the Beacon Centre with a cheque for £2,800 thanks to the generosity of guests at the newspaper's Business Awards event.
Nearly 400 people who attended the awards at Wolverhampton Racecourse dug deep for the Sedgley-based charity. A series of top raffle prizes were donated to help encourage a willing crowd who managed to raise a total of £2,841.
The raffle prize winners were Faye Thompson, who snared six bottles of Champagne, Mark Franklin who won a John Lewis hamper & M&S gift card, Victoria Leggett who won a Wolverhampton Racecourse hospitality package and John Wood, who won tickets to see Love Letters at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre, including a hospitality booth.
The cheque was presented by Express & Star Editor Keith Harrison to Beacon Centre chief executive Arwyn Jones.
Mr Jones said: "This generous donation will help us fund our low vision assessment and advice service, which is particularly important for those recently diagnosed.
"It can be a very emotional and traumatic time both for those directly affected and for their families."
The services can provide aids and assistive equipment to help people maintain an independent life and and manage their sight loss, ranging from talking clocks to the latest scanning and magnification devices.
Mr Jones said that across the Black Country there were 36,000 people currently living with sight loss, with nearly 10,000 of them in Wolverhampton. The growing number of older people and issues such as Type 2 diabetes, which can lead to sight loss, could see those numbers double by 2050.
The Beacon Centre, which started out in 1875 as the Wolverhampton Society for the Blind, now offers a broad range of services at its headquarters site in Sedgley and at its centres in Stourbridge and Cannock.
