Festive tree of remembrance raises £5,000
A tree of remembrance installed in Wolverhampton's Wulfrun Shopping Centre over Christmas has raised more than £5,000 for charities, fundraisers have said.
Shoppers were invited to leave a message for lost loved ones which went on display on the tree in exchange for a £5 donation.
Up to 368 people were remembered this year, organisers City of Wolverhampton Rotary Club said.
Lorraine McCarthy, Wolverhampton rotary president, thanked everyone who donated to the fundraiser, now in its 21st year.
Sponsored Breaks, which offers those in need a free campervan holiday, Wolverhampton MS Therapy & Oxygen Centre, which helps with long-term medical conditions, Compton Care, which supports people with incurable conditions, and the Rotary Club of Wolverhampton Charitable Trust each received £1,250.
"It was a pleasure to work with fellow rotarians, members of the public and our sponsors on this touching fundraiser," Ms McCarthy said.
"In total £5,607 was raised and to all those who have supported this initiative in any way I extend our heartfelt thanks."
Follow BBC Wolverhampton & Black Country on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
City's annual Tree of Remembrance unveiled
Wolverhampton Rotary Club
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
'She was a hero': Tennessee woman fostered more than 400 children, many with special needs
Nancy Arlene Woodall's phone rang in the middle of the night. It was her brother-in-law, Mike Beach, then the chief of police in Smyrna. Two young boys had been abused. Could she take them in? "That's what started everything," her daughter Michelle Brown recalled. That spontaneous act of kindness in the 1980s launched decades of Woodall serving as a foster mom to more than 400 Tennessee children, many with disabilities. She died June 8 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. She was 71. "The community is truly losing a gem of a person who had a selfless heart for one of the most vulnerable populations — foster children," said Kassie M. Davis, director of the Rutherford County CASA (court-appointed special advocates for children). "Most people would look away at the hardest foster care cases, but she opened her arms and welcomed them into her home multiple times over the years." Brown, 52, is the oldest of Woodall's three biological children. "What she did was amazing," Brown said. "She was a hero." Early on, Woodall cared for as many as 10 foster children in addition to her three biological children in her house at one time, her birth daughters and one former foster child said. Woodall made it work with strict house rules and expectations — each child did chores, and older kids helped care for the younger ones. Woodall also stayed in touch with her foster kids and mentored them long after they aged out, relatives and former foster kids said. "She changed lives and saved lives, and her legacy will never be forgotten," the state Department of Children's Services said in a June 10 Facebook post. One of her first foster children, Jennifer Ulrich, 50, said she and Woodall occasionally butted heads, but they stayed connected until Woodall died. "Coming to her in such a young age in 1987 was one of best things that could've ever happened in my life," said Ulrich, a storage facility manager in Smyrna. "Because of her, I am the person, the mother I am today." Woodall launched new programs to meet foster kids' needs as they popped up in her house. When she found out the state only gave foster parents an extra $50 for Christmas presents, Woodall started an Angel Tree program for all foster kids in Rutherford County. Woodall found sponsors and raised money every year until she died. When foster kids started arriving with belongings in trash bags, Woodall started a program to get luggage for youth in protective care. "Her impact extended FAR beyond her Rutherford County front door," DCS said in the Facebook post. "Nancy played a key role in shaping the Foster Parent Bill of Rights [and] she served as a foster parent advocate to mentor others." In 1991, Woodall took in a 4-month-old baby who'd been abused so badly that the girl would grow up unable to walk or talk. Woodall stopped working outside her home to have more time to take care of the girl, Amanda, whom Woodall adopted when the girl turned 16. After Amanda Woodall died in 2012, Nancy Woodall almost exclusively fostered children with disabilities or medical challenges. Those included children who'd had organ transplants, children with autism and children with Down syndrome, her birth daughters said. "Once she lost Amanda, she had a fear that nobody would take care of those kids, and she had the experience and knew how to do it," Brown said. "She didn't want a child left in a hospital room or a facility where they wouldn't get the attention they needed." Woodall's own medical issues stopped her from being able to foster kids in 2023, her birth daughters said. But she kept raising money for the Angel Tree program, and she kept advocating for foster kids and parents. Memorial services are planned for June 14. Visitation will be held from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., with the funeral immediately following at Woodfin Memorial Chapel, located at 1488 Lascassas Pike in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. In addition to her hundreds of foster children, Woodall, born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, is survived by her biological children, Michelle Brown (Aaron), Hannah Reynolds (Brent), and Matthew Adam Woodall (Whitney); grandsons, Knox and Cooper Reynolds; and siblings, Robert Butler (Cindy), Barbara Croft (George), Brenda Beach, Mike Trotter (Deborah), and Renee Butler; and nieces and nephews. The family has requested donations to the Rutherford County Angel Tree, P.O. Box 3135, Murfreesboro, TN 37133, or online at Reach Brad Schmitt at brad@ This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Remembering Tenn. woman, foster mom to hundreds of kids, many with special needs
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Local nonprofit accepting Christmas ornaments for fall event
DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) — Organizers of a nonprofit holiday event in Huber Heights are asking the public for donations of their unwanted Christmas ornaments. From 2 to 4 p.m. on June 14 behind St. Peter Elementary School at 6185 Chambersburg Road, a drive-thru, drop-off event will occur. Donated ornaments will be used for the St. Peter Christmas Bazaar, held the second weekend in November. Fake trees, lights and wreaths are not being accepted during the drop-off event. 'These are drive-thru events so if you can get the items into your car, we can take it from there,' said organizers. If you have ornaments to donate but can't make it out, email organizers here to set up an alternative arrangement. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Times
12 hours ago
- New York Times
The Strange Rise of the Before-and-After Tragedy Meme
Once or twice each year, while deleting old voice mail messages, I take a moment to listen to one I'll never get rid of: a Christmas greeting from an uncle who died just months later. Hearing his voice brightens my day, though it can also set me on a melancholic path. If not for my first bout of Covid-19, I would have been spending Christmas with him that year. Instead, I put off my trip; we never saw each other again, and never will. We now depend so much on technology that it has made our favorite devices and platforms, and the traces we leave on them, an unavoidable part of how we experience death. There was a time when the archive of an ordinary person's living years — the ephemera we would keep to remember them by — might have included just a few postcards and letters. Then came photographs and home videos. Then email exchanges and phone messages. Eventually social media platforms would make some of those traces public ones, trails of posts on zombie accounts that go on living long after their maker has ceased logging in. But even these had their own halo of privacy: Most would hold little significance to anyone who didn't know the departed and feel moved to retrace their digital footprints. A few months ago, though, it occurred to me that something had shifted. Whatever idle time I spent on TikTok or Instagram, I realized, was being haunted by an unsettling new meme format. A representative post might feature something like a video of a young man diving from a cliff, jumping on a trampoline or lifting weights, or maybe a still photograph of a young woman sunbathing on a beach, or two children playing. If music had been added, it would be either very somber or very upbeat, emphasizing the joy of the moment or the painful aftermath that was about to be revealed. The explication of that pain always took the form of a blunt bit of text sitting atop the image: 'She doesn't know it yet but this will be her last video with her little sister.' 'Laughing because I thought he was incredibly uncoordinated in this move, not because he was 2 months away from a terminal diagnosis.' 'He doesn't know it yet, but he will become completely paralyzed in less than 3 hours. This will be his last morning stretch.' There is no way to share grief without seeking someone's attention. My initial reaction was probably not what the posters of such memes had in mind. At first, the videos struck me as trite, even morbid — desperate dispatches from a generation incapable of tamping down its urge to post through every last one of life's twists and turns. This less-than-charitable reading probably had a lot to do with the clash, in these videos, between the medium and the message — the gulf between the visual language of TikTok memes, which are so often trivial or silly, and the kind of life-altering tragedies they were being used to capture. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
