Make My Day Better

is the charity arm of DialAFlight and the Lotus Group which supports a variety of projects around the world. The guiding principle is that the majority of the funding directly benefits the people.
   Activities range from providing fishing boats for Sri Lankan fishermen devastated by the Tsunami, to supporting a number of projects involving children in Africa.
   To date more than £2 million has been raised for these activities

Free books for 5000 Southwark children

Dolly Parton and DialAFlight have launched a reading scheme to help 5000 children in Southwark to learn to read. Every child born in the borough during 2016 will be eligible to receive a free book each month until they are five years old. The books are age appropriate and chosen by teaching specialists. Dolly was inspired to set up the ‘Imagination Library’ scheme in 1996 in her home town of Tennessee as a tribute to her father, a smart and hard-working man who was unable to read and write. She wants to guarantee access to books, inspire a lifelong love of reading and help children to reach their full potential.
Each child will receive a total of up to 60 Penguin books thereby building their very own Imagination Library.
Dolly says, “I remain convinced that if we could do one simple thing to inspire kids and adults to learn more, it would be to inspire them to read more. Reading and imparting a love of books is one of the most important things we can do for our children. And it’s never too early to start.”
DialAFlight’s HQ has been in Southwark for 35 years and the £750,000 scheme is the first borough-wide Imagination Library in London. It is funded entirely by our charity, Make My Day Better.
The key message is: “Make bedtime. Book time” to encourage parents to look at books together with their baby right from the early months. Research shows that children who are read to from an early age are better prepared for school. Sharing books with a child encourages bonding and development of language, communication and cognitive skills. Books are fuel for a child’s imagination.
The scheme was launched at Camberwell Library to coincide with Dolly’s birthday on January 19th and children’s author Sophy Henn read one of her books to the assembled children.

Sunflower Jam
rock concert at the
Royal Albert Hall

We were the main sponsors of this year’s Sunflower Jam concert at the Royal Albert Hall.
Rock fans, and many of our customers, heard former members of Deep Purple and Whitesnake including Ian Paice and Micky Moody together with Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden. Other artists included Alice Cooper, opera singer Alfie Boe singing rock and Nigel Kennedy. Led Zeppelin founder member John Paul Jones, Brian May and Kerry Ellis also appeared.
Proceeds went to a variety of projects including running a complementary health centre for children at Great Ormond Street and education in complementary and integrated care for doctors.

Cambodia Medical
Centre brings hope
to thousands

NEW HOPE is a charity in Siem Reap which makes a significant difference to thousands of very poor Cambodians
   It was started just four years ago by a local Cambodian and an Australian woman. They begun by creating a school raising the numbers of village children in education from six to 762. Next they created a medical centre staffed by 17 local Khmers providing health care to 10,000 people in 2011 alone.
   They then recognised the need to provide young adults with training so they could get jobs and become self supporting. So they embarked on a restaurant and training facility which DialAFlight has helped to fund.    More than 1000 overseas visitors have enjoyed a real dining experience and also been able to see some of the New Hope projects in Siem Reap at first hand. In this new facility. Please visit if you are passing through Cambodia.

Blind youngsters learn how to play cricket

DIALAFLIGHT is proud to support Cricket for Change which runs worldwide cricket programmes for blind youngsters.
   January 2013 will see Cricket for Change invited back to Barbados to play in a blind cricket series which will mark the 10th anniversary of when C4C first went to Barbados to help set up The West Indies Blind Cricket Team. The visit will also include a re-staging of a match against a Desmond Haynes Celebrity XI made up of past and present West Indies players.
   The C4C squad will be made up of young players from the C4C Visually Impaired programme and will be led by C4C's Director of Operations and former England VI player, Andy Dalby-Welsh.
   As well as taking part in the matches, the week long programme will involve the C4C squad coordinating a training programme for local coaches and young blind players.

Saving lives. How we
work with ShelterBox
when disaster strikes

WHEREVER disaster strikes, DialAFlight’s job is to get Shelterbox rescue teams out to remote corners of the globe. And they are usually the first relief organisation on the spot.
   Within minutes of a major disaster an advance rescue party leaves the ShelterBox base in Cornwall while DialAFlight springs into action to get them to their destination as quickly as possible.
   The famous green box has everything for survival for families who have lost everything. Specially designed tents that are cool in summer and hot in winter, cooking equipment, water purifying kits, cooking utensils, tools and 53 other items. They even include drawing materials for the children.

How O2 Rihanna night raised £6500. And a
few other projects…

• WE donated our O2 suite for a Rihanna concert to Chelsea’s Player of the Year awards. It was auctioned off for £6500 for Help a Capital Child.
• We are sponsoring 6 talented youngsters in Southwark with three year music scholarships as part of the Mayor’s Fund for Young Musicians.
• We are sponsoring a series of Autumn lectures for the College of Medicine.
• Other major sponsorships include Cricket for Change which helps to change the lives of blind kids, the Maypole Project, which supports 160 families in South East London with children that have life threatening illnesses. There are also dozens of smaller projects.

Helping Kenya’s
slum kids. The
orphan’s refuge

FOR THE PAST three years we have been funding a children’s refuge at Eldoret, which is a shanty town outside Nairobi.
   This refuge takes in street kids, some of whom lost their parents during the recent troubles. Many of these kids live by scavenging for scraps and sniffing glue which suppresses the appetite. The refuge provides them with meals and a place to sleep so they are able to attend school.
   In addition we have provided funding for them to start four small business in an attempt to become self sufficient.

Standproud. We’re
helping young Polio
victims to walk

VACCINATION programmes have failed to eradicate polio in parts of Africa and one of the worst affected countries is the Congo (DER) due partly to a continuous civil war.
   We provide half the funding to run the Standproud operation in Kinshasa which has helped hundreds of children to walk again.
   These children, many having spent time on the streets begging and pushing themselves around on homemade carts, are fitted with leg braces and taught to walk. Some are trained to make and fit leg braces for the next arrivals. Picture the smiles on their faces as these children regain their self respect and start to rebuild their lives.

Our research helps
war vets with PTSD
and herbal medicine

TRADITIONAL medicine is undergoing a renaissance because of increasing demand for alternatives to proprietary drugs.
   We are funding two projects over the next four years at the University of Westminster, one of the leaders for the development and teaching of herbal medicine.
   We are also sponsoring a pilot project at Edinburgh University into the benefit of war veterans using meditation to overcome the debilitating effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The Meditation Foundation, which will carry out the trial, has already run a similar project for the NHS in Birmingham which demonstrated that patients taught meditation techniques recovered faster from major surgery.

DialAFlight helps
Tsunami victims
rebuild their lives

THE BOXING DAY tsunami in 2004 killed more than a million people and changed the lives of many more.
   Anxious to help and wishing to avoid putting our money into the great collection box - much of which incidentally has never been spent - we sent our agent from the Maldives to Sri Lanka to see what could be done. The people’s houses and fishing boats had all been destroyed and they needed help getting their lives back on track.
   We financed a small fleet of replacement fishing boats, complete with engines and nets, which had to be sent to Tangalle with a police escort to avoid them being hijacked, together with some inshore fishing canoes for a community in Hambantota.

Surf Action and
DialAFlight help
vets with PTSD

WE ARE PROUD to be major sponsors of Surf Action, which does amazing work with war vets suffering from PTSD.
    Based in St Buryan, Cornwall they run beach clinics for soldiers, some of them amputees, and their families recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan which has massively beneficial effects. They have recently added residential courses to their activities. Surf Action was started by surf instructor Rich Emerson, a war vet with PTSD himself and his friend Russ Pierre.
   They are seen here with their new DialAFlight van on a recent surf camp.

Our staff put on their
running shoes to make
someone’s day better

ON A GLOOMY Sunday morning in April a number our staff put on their running shoes and headed along the Thames in a 10k race sponsored by Virgin and One and Only hotels.
   The DialAFlight fun run, which is organised entirely by themselves, raised a total of £7500 from friends and relatives all of which will contribute towards our charity projects. This is the second year that the run, which takes in six London bridges, has been held.

Our staff help to build
a school extension
in Malawi’s capital

WE HAVE recently finished building an extension to the largest primary school in Lilongwe where class sizes can average 200 pupils.
    This is one of a number of projects we have undertaken in conjunction with Buildaschool.com, a charity founded by a former member of our flights team. We are also involved with another project in Malawi which lends to families so that they can finance a cow. The milk from the herd is then sold through a cooperative at a guaranteed price and the family is able to pay off the loan and own the cow outright.
    Pictured are some of our staff who travelled to Lilongwe to help with the final works to the schoolhouse.