Dear Claire,

What a wonderful volunteer opportunity in Dementia Friends, and one dear to your heart, I know. I love all the different ways you can choose to participate. I checked to see whether there’s an initiative over here – and there is. Take a look at Dementia Friends USA. They are literally just beginning to put state licenses in place, so there’s rather a long way to go to match your numbers. Let’s hope it takes off!

On a very different note, I thought of you this past week when I saw a news story on the Six Nations Rugby tournament. We had the Super Bowl here last month. It won’t come as much of surprise to you that I’m not exactly a devotee of American football, but what was interesting was something they did at J’s school to benefit our Western New York food bank. They put two large bins in the entrance lobby, each representing one of the teams in the Super Bowl. Every child was asked to bring in a can of soup to deposit in the bin of the team they thought would win. As it turned out, it was a virtual tie between the two teams… quite the prediction, when you think that for the first time in Super Bowl history the teams did in fact tie and had to go into overtime! Anyway, I thought this was a clever idea for any group who might want to collect food donations for a food bank or shelter or another cause. They called it the “Souper Bowl” 😊.

You’d need something different in the UK, of course. Perhaps the Canned National (groan)! Not quite sure what you’d do with the Six Nations!

With love,

Sam

PS Guess how much food the students collected  for the food bank? A whopping 2000 lbs! So the principal rewarded the students with a late-start day, which just happened to be the day after everyone stayed up to watch the game….