Tom Jones has donated nearly £4,000 to Lifelites to help fund donations of special Ipads for children's hospices across the British Isles.
This generous donation will support Lifelites to donate 10 special iPads that come with drop proof covers and are packed full of special apps that help life-limited and disabled children to communicate and play.
Tom Jones chose Lifelites as one of twenty charities he wanted to support this year. Having a large and very close family, including eight grandchildren, Tom told Lifelites that children’s charities have always been especially dear to his heart. He first heard of Lifelites five years ago while he was a master of the Rugby Bastion Lodge, whose PGM at the time had chosen Lifelites as their charity. Since then he has been a supporter in his own right, and when seeing an online post earlier this year about the special Lifelites iPads, he knew he wanted to donate to give more children access to this magical technology.
Like many, due to the pandemic, Tom says that he has learned a new appreciation for technology and how it can help us all to communicate. Having previously never used Zoom before he said that it had been a huge help to him in keeping in contact both with his family and also with his fellow Freemasons.
But for many life-limited and disabled children, this technology has always been vital in enabling them to communicate in ways they may not have been able to before. This was a large part of why Tom wanted to donate in particular to help fund Lifelites iPads, one of the most popular pieces of Lifelites donated technologies.
Lifelites empowers 10,000 life-limited and disabled children and young people in hospices by providing them with opportunities to benefit from the power of assistive and inclusive technologies to learn, to be creative, to communicate and to take control. There is a Lifelites project for children using every baby and children’s hospice service across the British Isles. The hospices do not pay a penny towards their Lifelites project and all of Lifelites’ work is funded by donations: the equipment, ongoing technical support and training at each hospice costs around £50,000 over four years.