On Saturday 24^th February, we have our third annual fundraising dinner in the Brighton College dining room, with pre-dinner drinks in the Simon Smith Café from 7pm. The cost of the tickets will be £50 each or £90 for a pair, which includes a three-course dinner, a pre-dinner drink and a bottle of wine; tickets can be obtained by emailing pwilson@brightoncollege.net by Friday 26^th January – do include details of any preferred seating arrangements.

Alongside other entertainment, we are delighted to announce that our guest speaker will be Tom Ilube, an entrepreneur and educational philanthropist, who was recently ranked first, ahead of Mo Farah and Lewis Hamilton, in the Powerlist 2017, an annual listing of the UK’s 100 most powerful people with African or Afro-Caribbean heritage.  He established the Hammersmith Academy in 2011 and is a non-executive Director for the BBC, also receiving the 2017 Beacon Award for Innovation in philanthropy. He created and launched Noddle.co.uk, co-founded Garlik, the online identity company, and is the founder and current CEO of Crossword Cybersecurity plc. Tom Ilube is the chair and founder of the African Gifted Foundation, the charity behind the African Science Academy in Ghana, a school for gifted female STEM students which Reading Spots is working in partnership with in several respects; he also has an interest in African fiction, having provided the prize money for the Nommo Awards for African science fiction.

The dinner will be held with the aim of completing the fundraising for the construction of a significant community library in Abofour, which we hope will be a flexible education centre for IT training, teacher training and adult literacy lessons in the future. All of our ‘Reading Spots’ are flexible education spaces, run by the local community, bringing children and adults together through a shared aim of advancing their education. To read more about the wider project visit: www.readingspots.org. Miss Cat Davison will also be returning for the event from a sabbatical year in Ghana, to explain a little bit more about our model, the impact it is making, and the future ahead.

We would be particularly grateful to receive donations of any raffle or auction items. Please do email Mr Paul Wilson and Miss Cat Davison at pwilson@brightoncollege.net and contact@readingspots.org with details of anything that you might be able to offer for this cause. We wish you all the very best wishes for the start of 2018; we do hope that you may be able to join us on this occasion.