The Park Charity Fund is launched and immediately backs three great worthy causes

Committed to its community values, the North East’s largest independent electrical wholesaler, Park Electrical Distributors, has launched the Park Charity Fund.

The company has pledged to match all funds raised by staff to a maximum of £25,000 during the first year.

It will assist three regional charities, Cleveland Alzheimers Residential Centre, the Heel & Toe Children’s Charity, which is based in Chester-le-Street and supports children with cerebral palsy and other physical disabilities and Darcey’s Dream, a Blyth-based charity which assists newly bereaved families.

The fund is led by Park’s Teesside branch manager, Tony Arena, managing director, Barry Wilkinson, lighting design key accounts manager, Karl Snowdon, general manager, myKNX, Paul Kinghorn, national sales manager, Graham McMullen and PR and communications manager, Rachel Wilkinson.

Tony Arena, said: “As a company we have, over the years, supported a number of North East charities. We will continue to do this via the Park Charity Fund and through our employee volunteering scheme, whereby members of the team have the opportunity to help out on day release at their chosen community initiative or charity.

“Park will extend its support to three local charities that reflect the locations of our five branches across the North East. As such, we are delighted to put a plan in place to raise valuable funds for the three charities based across Teesside, Durham and Northumberland.

“We have created a Park Charities brand and we will be utilising our trade counters to promote this as well as raising funds through various sales and promotional activities.

“During the course of 2019, we will be involved in social gatherings, challenges and our Gateshead branch has committed to cycling the coast-to-coast route in June. It will also be the company’s pleasure to match fund up to £25,000 against money raised by staff during the next 12 months. So, potentially, we could raise up to £50,000 to be split across the charities.

“We have a long standing relationship with the Heel & Toe Children’s Charity and recently designed and supplied lighting to its new hydrotherapy centre and we look forward to helping it and the other two charities even further during the next 12 months.”

Gayle Tweed, chief executive at Cleveland Alzheimers Residential Centre, said: “We are delighted that Park has selected us as one of its chosen charities for 2019-2020.  We have been supporting people to live well with dementia for the past 30 years and we will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Tony Arena recently volunteered at our dementia café, which was greatly appreciated and we would like to thank the Park team and Tony, in particular, for their support of our charity.”