Good Shepherd Appeal 2021

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19^th January 2021

Dear friend of Father Hudson’s

Only a Head Teacher colleague can understand the pressures you have been under over the last year and which will be continuing for some time yet. As someone also in a leadership position, who is responsible for the seventeen different services of Father Hudson’s I have a shared understanding of the challenge of ensuring vital services are there for those whom we serve, whether it be children and their families in school communities or the many different people we support at Father Hudson’s who are in great need. And we too have continued to serve, whatever the challenge.

I want to thank you for your support last year and to share with you how we are modifying our approach to working with you on our Lenten Good Shepherd appeal and Mass, which I know in recent years have been important parts of your calendar too.

We want to be able to provide something that may be of use to you and enable us to tell the story of the work we do to the children, parents and staff in your school communities, when so many are learning from home, now and for the foreseeable future.

We have decided to make all our resources available online and we thought it might be helpful if we took a different theme each week from our core areas of work with people who are homeless, those who are refugees and asylum seekers, those who have complex needs and learning and/or physical disabilities, those who are very elderly, and children and young people through our fostering and family support in schools’ service. We will provide resources online each week about each one of these areas. We hope you may be able to find ways of sharing these.

At the same time, we are aware that for most schools any fundraising in Lent may be extremely difficult so we are suggesting that you may be willing to do some fundraising in the summer term instead. We hope that finding out about the work that we do during Lent may inspire the children and families to continue to support the work.

As Eloise notes in her accompanying letter, we will still have the Good Shepherd Mass online at the Cathedral, which so many schools participated in last year. It is this Catholic ethos that inspires all the work we do and the mission we have.

Without your support this work would not take place.

Yours