The money, from the masons' Norman Jackson Fund will be used to support the charity's annual pantomime and distribution of its Kinship Care Notebook to schools across County Durham.
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00:00Mel Nichols is the CEO and founder of More Than Grandparents. What do you actually do?
00:06We support kinship carers, so that's relatives, grandparents, aunties, uncles who are raising a relative child
00:14but a majority of our kinship carers are grandparents raising their grandchildren
00:18because they can't live with their mums and dads for various reasons.
00:21And what are you going to be using this money for?
00:24Every year we do a pantomime with our families, so the families get together and they write the pantomime themselves
00:29and share ideas and then we've got a script writer who puts the script together
00:36and we perform it to our local community, so we're looking for funding to help us do that
00:41to help us pay for the script writer and staffing costs and costumes and stuff
00:46so we can perform this pantomime to the local community
00:49and it helps bring a little bit of money back to the charity as well.
00:52And I understand you've produced a booklet for schools?
00:54We have, we've produced a booklet about kinship care
00:58because our children were telling us that their friends at school didn't understand kinship care
01:02and were saying mean things to them
01:04so we decided that a good way to address that would be to introduce a book into schools
01:10to help educate the children about kinship care
01:13because it's not widely spoken about, adoption is spoken about, foster care is spoken about
01:17but kinship care isn't widely known
01:19so the idea is that we'll get those books into schools
01:22we've already got books into Sunderland schools
01:27so each Sunderland school has received two copies
01:30and the Freemasons charity have funded some more books
01:35so we're waiting for those to be printed and delivered
01:37and they will be delivered to Durham schools
01:39so each Durham school will receive two copies of the book as well.
01:45John Watts is the Deputy Head of Durham Freemasons
01:48How's the money been raised?
01:50Well a few years ago our national Masonic charity gave £13,500 to this particular organisation
01:58More Than Grandparents
02:00we've watched what they're doing
02:02and an opportunity arose that one of our members
02:05our former members, Norman Jackson
02:07passed away a few years ago
02:09gave quite a significant legacy to us
02:11so we have some extra funding available at the moment
02:14More Than Grandparents is one of those causes that we were really attracted to
02:20so we've now given them another £7,500 from that fund
02:24to enable us to supply these books around schools throughout County Durham
02:29and we really hope that the schools that receive them
02:32will enjoy them and get benefit from them.