CHIPS
CHIPS: Changing lives
Using funds raised by members of the casino industry, CHIPS has given powered wheelchairs to over 500 children in need in the UK. Casino International met with charity co-founders Linda Lindsay and Peter McNally to find out about what they do, and how they do it
Linda Lyndsay at the British Casino Awards, where she was able to tell guests about the charity’s work in a moving speech
CI: Why did you found CHIPS? Linda Lindsay: To help children who don’t get NHS funding for powered wheelchairs. Peter McNally: Why it was started originally was that Linda and her husband ran JohnHuxley casino suppliers; they decided to have a company golf day for their customers, and we realised it could be a good way to raise funds for charity. In the early days we started raising money for the Peter Alliss Powered Wheelchair fund, then thought, why are we raising these funds through the casino industry for somebody else? Why don’t we do it for a charity in our own right? We then formed CHIPS with Alan Goodenough and Tony Jackson, and we have been raising funds for CHIPS ever since; CHIPS as an organisation has been around since 2001.
Linda presents the exceptional Irene Nuqui with the CHIPS Community Engagement Award at the British Casino Awards. Irene has raised many thousands of pounds for CHIPS and has great plans for more fundraising in the future
48 MARCH 2018
CI: How much do you raise a year? LL: In 2017, it was close to £250,000.
CI: What is your fundraising ratio? How much does it cost you to raise each pound? LL: We don’t have costs. Every penny raised goes
toward the wheelchairs – everything we do is voluntary, we have no expenses. PM: There are expenses when you have a golf day, for example, but everything over and above that goes directly into the wheelchairs. Linda pays her own expenses, everyone involved does the same.
CI: Why do this in particular, is there a personal reason? LL: No, there is no personal reason. When we were raising funds for the Peter Alliss organisation, there were a couple of things I was not wildly happy with and I put it to the committee; Peter Alliss looks at it from the standpoint of, there’s the chair – let’s find a child to fill it. We work a different way – we find the children first, then we make the chair specifically for each child. The other aim of the charity is that we felt the only person getting any kudos was the other organisation (in this case, Peter Alliss), and what we wanted to do was show that the gaming industry, where our funds were coming from, actually gives something back. The perception from outside is that the gaming industry only takes, and we wanted to show it gives a lot back.
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