Thank you for raising your voices this November

This November, you’ve once again wowed us with your commitment to transforming the future for everyone affected by pancreatic cancer. From fundraising, to lighting up buildings and running awareness stalls, we can’t thank you enough for your hard work this month. Here’s a rundown of our highlights.

Coming together to raise funds

An amazing 2,240 of you fundraised this month, from rising to the challenge of walking 30k in November despite the horrendous weather, to getting creative with Do Your Own Thing.

You’ve completed cold swims, held coffee mornings and cake sales, shaved your heads, given up things you love and organised collections in your local communities to raise vital funds.

Mary is the community champion at Tesco and this year, her store lost a beloved colleague. Mary organised a purple balloon arch, Cadbury tombola, collection and all the staff wore purple to raise vital awareness. Mary said, “it was a huge success and we raised £765 across 2 days.”

A huge well done to Mary and all our incredible fundraisers.

Together, you’ve so far contributed over £314,360 to transforming the future of pancreatic cancer, allowing us to continue the journey to a research breakthrough, campaign for change and support people right now.

Thank you.

Lighting up the UK purple

Purple Lights for pancreatic cancer is a special part of PCAM. Not only does arranging for a building to glow purple raise vital awareness amongst the public, it allows us moments to reflect and honour those affected by this devastating disease, including those we have lost.

This November, you lit up a fantastic 180 landmarks and homes across the UK and we’ve loved seeing beautiful photos of them arrive in our purple lights gallery. Thank you 💜

This year, Tina from Southend went to astounding lengths to spread awareness right across the country, by contacting each of the UK’s councils and arranging a total of 40 light ups, everywhere from Aberdeen to Wakefield to Oxford. She even got in touch with photographers local to each one and arranged for them to be captured beautifully.

Breaking through the silence at St PancrEas

We were thrilled to once again partner with St Pancras Station to raise our voices and funds on World Pancreatic Cancer Day.

Throughout the day, the station changed its name to St PancrEas, eye-catching awareness screens were displayed around the station, and the iconic voice of Ruby Wax, as the new station announcer, could be heard highlighting the importance of the day for people passing through.

Together with our wonderful volunteers and the fabulous Popchoir, who raised their voices for pancreatic cancer for the sixth year running, we raised over £2,600!

Raising awareness in healthcare settings

Healthcare professionals did a fantastic job in helping us to spread awareness by distributing our symptoms awareness packs, amounting to over 6,000 individual publications about pancreatic cancer.

Emma Gartside at Torentum Primary Care Network in Thornton-Cleveleys ordered awareness packs for their surgeries and went the extra mile to hand-make these beautiful ribbons which she sold to raise funds for us at the same time as raising awareness.

The varied work of our amazing volunteers

Our volunteers have had a busy PCAM – they’ve delivered awareness presentations to workplaces and community groups across the UK, reaching over 400 people with information about the signs and symptoms of pancreatic cancer and our work.

Our team Scotland volunteers have raised over £1,000 through supermarket awareness stands across Scotland.

Together, our volunteers have undertaken over 200 hours of awareness raising activities this month. Thank you so much to everyone who has taken part and helped us to reach more people with vital information about pancreatic cancer.

We really couldn’t do it without you.

Raising awareness online

Throughout November, we reached a total of 13.3 million people across our website and social media channels. That’s more than 1/6 of the UK’s population!

You’ve helped us spread the word by sharing our social posts and raising awareness through your own channels by sharing our symptoms content over 400 times.

Making the headlines

Your stories have helped us hit the headlines several times throughout the month.

From sharing your concerns for the NHS this winter, to explaining the importance of arranging for landmarks to glow purple, you’ve made sure pancreatic cancer is on the agenda for local and national news outlets, including The Metro, Mirror, Independent, Sun, Express BBC, Yahoo, Sky, ITV and many more!

Thank you so much from the whole team at Pancreatic Cancer UK