Swift Group team to embark on Three Peaks Challenge as part of charity campaign

Staff at the UK’s largest manufacturer of touring caravans, motorhomes and holiday homes will support a charity in the company’s home village next week by rising to the Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge.

More than 60 colleagues at Swift Group will set off from their factory in Cottingham before the sun comes up to raise funds for the Daisy Appeal, which works at Castle Hill Hospital on the other side of the village to improve accuracy and detection rates for people with cancer, heart disease and dementia in Hull, East Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire.

The Swift team will also be supporting Dove House Hospice in Hull with the effort which the company’s health and wellbeing adviser Katy Rhoades said is their biggest single charity event yet in terms pf participants.

Katy said: “It’s part of our Swift Active campaign and it came from carrying out a survey of colleagues to find out what sort of things they wanted to do. A lot of people said they wanted to try the Yorkshire Three Peaks challenge so we set it up.”

The fundraisers will leave the Swift site at 3am on Saturday 16 September for the coach trip to the Pennines where they will tackle Pen-y-Ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough before heading back to the more level terrain of East Yorkshire.

The climb will be a new experience for the vast majority of the group but even before they set foot on the coach they are nearly halfway towards their financial target of £2,000, with the Swift Active Fundraising page listed in the top 15 per cent for the last month by JustGiving.

They are also being supported by the Hull branch of John E Wright commercial printers, which has provided banners free of charge to display at the summit of each peak, Katy said: “Some of our team have done it before but for most of us it will be a first.

I’ve got two children under seven so the only running around I do is after them, but I’ll be taking part along with a whole range of other people from across the business.

“Some are apprehensive but they are all pleased to have the chance to give it a go.

They are doing it as a team and supporting two great causes so that’s what it’s all about.

“There are some who are very competitive and will be giving it everything, a lot of us are just crossing our fingers and hoping for the best, but we’re really looking forward to it.”

Claire Levy, Fundraiser for the Daisy Appeal, said: “With something like 1,330 employees Swift Group is one of the biggest businesses in the Hull and East Yorkshire area and, having been founded nearly 60 years ago, has been in Cottingham even longer than we have!

“To get together 63 people for the Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge is a fantastic achievement. We wish them all the very best and we look forward to congratulating them when they return. We’re also talking to Swift Group and to other businesses about further fundraising events and we would love to hear from anybody who would like to support the Daisy Appeal with its work.”

Since its foundation in 2002 the Daisy Appeal has raised more than £22m. The Daisy Appeal Medical Research Centre opened on the Castle Hill Hospital site in 2008 and was followed, in 2014, by the opening of the Jack Brignall PET-CT Scanning Centre, housing the first in a new type of Siemens scanner in the country.

The MIRC has been built at a cost of £8.8m and is due for completion later this year.

To find out more about the Daisy Appeal visit https://daisyappeal.org/

To support the Swift Group fundraisers visit https://bit.ly/45WAOjj

Picture details

Some of the Swift Group fundraisers outside the company’s factory in Cottingham.