About

For the wellbeing of Northamptonshire

Our History

The genesis of Northants Community Aid dates back to 2006 when Firoz Makhani, a Northampton GP, initiated a fundraising event to raise funds for a breast screen unit at Northampton General hospital.

He approached fellow medical staff, patients and local business to help in this effort and the centrepiece of this effort was a sponsored walk around Pitsford reservoir; from this Walk for a Cause was born, taking the perimeter map of the reservoir as their logo.

Firoz continued to develop the initiative registering Walk for a Cause as a charity and securing the support of local business, principally those from his own African/Indian community. For the next few years the charity prospered, more fundraising events were organised and it was in 2014 that Steve Adams was introduced to the charity as a potential source of funds for his charity Teach Africa.

Our application was successful, and in fact we also secured a second tranche of funding. Around 2016 Steve got involved in some of the fundraising for Walk for a Cause using the facilities of his events company, Go Beyond. This then led to Steve being invited to become a trustee and subsequently chair of the charity.

Unfortunately, at this time for one reason or another, ironically ill health, many of the original trustees and benefactors were longer being able to support the charity resulting in an almost complete breakdown in the original funding model.

Together with Kathryn Ozlati, Steve did his best to “keep the show on the road” but it soon became clear to both of us that unless we made some fundamental changes the charity would not survive beyond the reserve funds we held.

Enter Paul Bone, who Steve met while Paul’s company was re-roofing his house; and in conversation, Paul expressed an enthusiasm for doing some fundraising for local social enterprise groups who he felt were adding significant value to the communities he grew up in.

The conversation developed to include other small businesses and the possibility of using a renamed and restructured version of Walk for a Cause as the platform for the initiative. Paul was also involved in a local networking group, as was Kathryn where we could engage with other small businesses and for the three of us it felt very much like the basis of a plan.

And so in 2020 and in the heart of a global pandemic, Northants Community Aid came into being with Paul joining the committee as a Trustee joining Bob Walder, Val Bridges, Kathryn Ozlati and Steve. We refocused our funding support to local small charities, particularly those focused on the health and well being of the communities they served, while Paul and Kathryn recruited other local businesses to the cause into our membership model.

To date we have provided support to more than a dozen charities, have a growing membership of small businesses and have a new set of fundraising events such as a Golf Day, Quiz Night and a Gala Ball. We have also been joined by three new trustees: Paul Green, Tracy Whittaker Smith MBE and Sam Sayer who from January 2023 will take over as chair.

At the heart of our ambition is to extend the membership we currently enjoy and in so doing extent the extent of the support we can provide to local small charities and social enterprise groups which in the post pandemic, global financial crisis environment, has never been more desperately needed.

For the wellbeing of Northamptonshire