Our Treasurer Martin Banks has made a recent successful bid to the AVIVA Community Fund, meaning we now have a chance to secure a £5,000.00 award to fund vitally needed equipment for the team.
We need your help to secure enough votes so we can make the finals, where a judging panel will award the £5,000.00 community funds to a worthy cause.
The Aviva Community Fund offers organisations like Bolton Mountain Rescue Team the chance to secure funding for important causes.
It’s open to everyone – Aviva customers, employees, insurance brokers or financial advisers and the general public – AVIVA want to support projects that will make a difference.
We are now appealing to all our website readers, Twitter and Facebook followers to support us with your kind vote, and also through your own personal social media links engage the support of your friends as well to support us.
With the closing date of Saturday 30th May 2015 for voting fast approaching there is no time to lose.
Go to: https://community-fund.aviva.co.uk/voting/Project/View/3773 to vote, give us all 10 of your possible votes!
Bolton Mountain Rescue Team has provided Search and Rescue services to its local community and beyond since 1968. 100% volunteers, responding 24/7, 365 days a year. See YouTube:
See also www.boltonmrt.org.uk
We provide direct assistance to the Police, Ambulance and Fire Services and are an integral part of an Emergency Response to the local and regional community.
It’s not just mountains!
We are often seen searching or assisting the emergency services in our urban communities as we are in our rural areas.
In 2014 we dealt with in excess of 100 incidents from missing children to elderly people with dementia; mountain bikers to climbers; from walkers to runners; in snow and ice when the ambulance can’t get there we can, our incidents are many and diverse.
We are funded almost totally by the public, charitable donations, bequests and gifts and receive very little direct government financial support.
To Support our vital work in the local and regional community we need to train regularly, to a high standard, and in this respect we would like to replace and upgrade our training manikins.
We would like to buy semi-automated life like manikins to provide more training options, (these are also used at team lectures, demonstrations and open day events we attend).
The manikin and an additional airway head we would like to upgrade too, costs circa £4,250.00 and subject to a successful bid with the support of your votes, could be in service within weeks.
In our team we have two operational and one trainee mountain rescue search dogs.
One of our operational dogs, Sasha, is a specialist Drowned Victims Search Dog one of only two in Great Britain working within mountain rescue, and as specialist asset she is used across the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.
To enhance our search capabilities we would like to purchase a small sonar kit for our boat to complement DVSD Search Dog Sasha’s keen nose!
At £750.00 this is a relatively inexpensive piece of vital equipment that will assist in the search for drowned people and may help bring difficult searches to a conclusion, not only in our operational area but across the UK.
The service we provide covers 800sq km in our primary operational area, from Darwen, Lancashire, in the north to Manchester Airport, Greater Manchester in the south, Wigan to the west and the centre of Manchester to the east, a huge diverse population, with large amounts of open countryside, rural, semi urban and built up environments.
This award if successful, of £5,000.00 would fully fund all these important purchases, and greatly enhance the resources available to us.
With our funding and running costs almost totally reliant on the support of the communities we exist to help, this hopeful support from Aviva would be a significant help to the work of the Bolton Mountain Rescue Team.
