As reported in December, together we raised £1500 for Safe-Tay and the causes that they support at Book Yer Ane Fest IX. We are absolutely delighted to now be able to share with you details of the causes the money has gone towards supporting, albeit a little later than planned. We are very proud to have worked with Lisa Stuart, founder of Safe-Tay, who has been massively supportive every step of the way.

A donation of £500 was made to The Royal Life Saving Society. The RLSS are celebrating their 125th year of drowning prevention and the money will be used in the ongoing training and awareness raising programmes on the east coast of Scotland. The RLSS welcomed the launch of the first ever National Strategy for Drowning Prevention that was launched at Westminster this week.

A donation of £400 was also made to Mindspace, a newly expanded mental health counselling and recovery service based in Perth. Mindscape offer a range of services for both adults and young people from age eleven, providing person-centred support and recovery programmes and various one-to-one and group therapies. Mindscape has recently moved to its new premises at 18-20 York Place, Perth.

Likewise, another donation of £400 was made to Insight, a support and counselling service founded as the National Counselling Service in the most socially deprived areas of Dundee in 1995. Insight now offers support and counselling services of various types in a non-judgmental, empathic, user-focussed manner and has support thousands of people on the east coast/Angus over the last twenty years.

Finally, at the suggestion of Lisa Stuart and with our collective agreement, £200 will go towards a forthcoming joint awareness raising project between Safe-Tay and MTAT, full details of which we shall bring you as soon as possible.

2016 is a hugely significant year; it marks ten years since the founding of Safe-Tay and ten years since the passing of Lisa’s brother Graham Motion. It also marks ten years since the formation of MTAT and this year will be the tenth Book Yer Ane Fest.

Book Yer Ane Fest X will happen in Dundee from Friday 2nd through Sunday 4th December 2016. This year we will be supporting Tayside Mountain Rescue and will be raising money for water safety kits and ongoing training. Full details of BYAF X will be forthcoming over the next nine months.

Collectively, we would like to thank Lisa Stuart for her ongoing support over the years. Thank you also, from the bottom of our hearts, to every single person who supports BYAF and everything that we do.

BYAF is something very personal to us and has come to mean different things to different people over the years, but at its very core, it’s about community. We are very proud to be able to give back even just a little of what has been given to us.

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Thank you.