Support our community fundraising for Sovereign!

Community volunteers are at the heart of Sovereign as they get involved in all aspects of the production, from onstage roles, to backstage roles in wardrobe and marketing. It is their commitment and enthusiasm that makes our community productions a success! Tickets alone do not cover the cost of putting on such a large-scale community production and so fundraising is vital to the success of the project; to keep the community spirit at the heart of the production we have launched a community fundraising campaign with the help of our volunteers.

Our most ambitious community fundraising activity is taking part in York Rotary Club’s Dragon Boat race on 09 July. We will be joined on board by YTR Staff Members and Sovereign community volunteers as we battle it out down the Ouse to fundraise for Sovereign. Some of our community volunteers are semi-professional rowers so we are hoping for a fast race time. We have competed in the Dragon Boat Race for the past couple of years and we know that we will have lots of fun raising money and competing on the day.

Above is a photo from our first Dragon Boat team meeting. It was wonderful to come together as a team for the first time, discuss race tactics and motivate each other to fundraise. As you can tell lots of serious training happened too!

Our fundraising page is currently open for donations and we have an ambitious £2,000 fundraising target for the race. 2/3 of all funds raised will go towards Sovereign and 1/3 will go towards York Rotary Club’s chosen charities which this year are Kyra Women’s charity and Big Future Foundation. This is the perfect opportunity to step into the spotlight and make a difference by supporting your local community.

We want to make sure that all community volunteers have the opportunity to get involved with community fundraising and we have just ran our first raffle which raised over £300. There were lots of prizes on offer, from afternoon tea for two at The Grand, a spa treatment at No.1 by Guest House and a rug made from recycled plastic from Shared Earth. The cast, wardrobe volunteers and choir loved getting involved and we had six lucky winners. We will be running another raffle to keep motivation high and give six more people the opportunity to win some wonderful prizes. Thank you to our sponsors and supporters that have given us prizes to make this raffle possible.

It is important that we stay creative with our community fundraising too and we are planning to run a bake sale. Our community volunteers certainly deserve some cake in between their busy rehearsals! All volunteers will be invited to bring a cake or baked treat to rehearsal and these will be sold during a break. We hope to raise further funds to support the production through the bake sale.

All fundraising related to Sovereign is crucial and we are grateful to our community volunteers for helping us with our community fundraising strand! For further information on Sovereign fundraising and if you’d like to support the production further, please get in touch with our Development Officer via fundraising@yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.