Anthem raises £5,700 across its brands in February’s Anthem Appeal

As part of our continued commitment to supporting charities close to the hearts of our different communities, February saw the launch of the first Anthem Appeal. After a month of fundraising, we’re proud to be able to give a total of £5,700 to our chosen charities.

When the third UK lockdown was announced at the start of January 2021, we realised that life was going to become very tough again for a lot of people. Everyone is affected by lockdown in different ways, but we knew that it could cause many members of our communities to face the threat of food shortages, mental health issues, domestic violence and income loss, amongst so many other things.

In March 2020, when the UK first went into lockdown, Anthem, like many other publishing companies, faced our own problems and fears about how we would get through the incredibly tough times ahead.

We asked our audiences to support us by continuing their subscriptions, buying issues direct from us if they couldn’t get to the supermarkets or high street, and being patient with us when we had to suspend titles for a few months, and change others to different frequencies.

The supportive reaction was incredible and we’ll forever be grateful to our audiences for keeping us going through those tough times.

Giving back

A year on and we might look like a slightly different company, but we’ve thankfully bounced back and are stronger. We don’t take that for granted.

So this time round, we wanted to be able to use our stronger position for good and try to raise some money for other charities and organisations who are doing really important work, but may be struggling with the funding to do so at the moment.

In order to do as much good as possible, we chose to support a different charity for each brand, which would be close to the hearts of our audiences.

Which charities are we supporting?

Women’s Running put its fundraising power behind Women’s Aid and managed to raise a total of £750 for the charity.

Vegan Food & Living chose to split its fundraising between three vegan food banks in order to spread the support all over England. The three charities are Made in Hackney’s Community Meal Service, Vegans Against World Hunger, which runs the Bath Vegan Food Bank and supports Worthing Vegan Food Bank and Mutual Aid Vegan Food Bank in Brighton, and finally Vegan Food Bank North East England. Vegan Food & Living raised £1,500 in total, so each food bank will receive a donation of £500.

Planet Mindful and Colouring Heaven both decided to raise money for Mind UK. Colouring Heaven raised £500, while Planet Mindful raised £200, making a combined donation of £700.

Italia! offered its support from afar to the Italian Red Cross, raising a total of £1250.

Classic Pop and Vintage Rock joined forces to help Stagehand keep roofs over the heads of live crew members while gigs and festivals are cancelled. £1,500 will be making its way to this foundation.

In the end our brands raised a total of £5,050, which Anthem topped up by 10% so we could donate a total of £5,700 to the various charities.

We’re very proud to say that this means Anthem has now raised over £31,000 over the last 18 months for charity. We don’t plan to stop there, so keep an eye out for what we get up to next.