Just four weeks after the St Paul s Cathedral fundraising drive was launched, it reached the milestone last night thanks to the incredible support of Mail readers and a string of donors.
The Remember Me campaign for a Covid memorial at St Paul’s Cathedral was handed a £100,000 boost yesterday thanks to a generous donation from property developer Sir John Ritblat.
The businessman and philanthropist said he and his family felt ‘privileged’ to join those helping create the national memorial ‘as a place for all faiths to visit and remember those who have died’.
The donation took the campaign, which is backed by the Daily Mail, over the £1.75million mark – meaning it is well on track to hit the £2.3million target for the tribute located at the London landmark.
One of Britain’s most successful businessmen, Sir John, 85, bought property company British Land for £1million in 1970 and turned it into a FTSE100 business
Whether sent in at the click of a button or as a handwritten cheque in the post, donations from nearly 9,000 Mail readers have now helped us reach a stupendous £303,000 for the Remember Me campaign.
Your immense generosity has helped the drive for a national memorial to Covid victims at St Paul’s Cathedral reach a magnificent £1.7million.
Leaders at the London landmark, who have joined forces with the Mail to help raise £2.3million for the tribute, said they were ‘amazed and deeply moved’ by the kindness of our readers.
It has been just 18 days since the campaign launched. Yet more than 3,350 cheques – totalling £123,845 – have already arrived, including one from a 100-year-old reader who survived Covid.
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Oxford Foundry, University of Oxford, has launched an Entrepreneurial Fellowship Initiative to proactively ensure that we see more people from Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic backgrounds in senior leadership positions within business, start-ups, and venture capital.
The Parker Review (March 2021) found that nearly a fifth of FTSE 100 companies lack board-level ethnic diversity, and only five ethnic minority directors occupy a CEO position, compared to six ethnic minority directors that held CEO/Chair positions in 2020. Reports have also shown that in the last ten years, less than 1% of venture capital investment in the UK went to Black entrepreneurs, and Black female entrepreneurs received just 0.02% of investment.