End-of-year message from Kenneth Foreman, London Marathon Events Ltd Head of Charities

In just a couple of weeks we’ll have welcomed in the new year and hopefully we’ll all be looking forward to better times ahead.

The past year has been one of the most challenging in our history, as I am sure it has for your organisations. The charity sector, along with the mass participation sports industry, has, in many cases, been devastated by the events of the last year and it will take a long time for us all to fully recover. However, despite the hardships, there are many reasons to be positive about the future.

In the last nine months we have seen that when we come together we can support each other and rise to challenges in new and innovative ways. The creation of The 2.6 Challenge in April, in just a few short weeks, helped charities raise more than £11 million when it was most needed. The move to virtual events, with more than 38,000 runners from across the world taking part in the Virgin Money London Marathon – The 40th Race – along with My Prudential RideLondon and the virtual Vitality London 10,000, allowed people to still feel the joy of taking part in an event while also raising much-needed money for good causes. These collaborations demonstrate what we can achieve by working together and it is this that gives me hope for the year ahead.

We will all have learnt a great deal from the challenges we have faced this year and I’m sure that if we were to have this time again there are things we would have done differently. However, one thing is certain: every challenging decision London Marathon Events have made over the course of this year has been made in line with our vision of inspiring activity, our core values as an organisation and our key aims, which include maximising revenue for charities.

We have many exciting plans for 2021 and we are looking forward to sharing them with you. We want to continue to strengthen our partnership with the charity sector and we have already set some of those plans in motion with our exciting new website: virginmoneylondonmarathon.com. It has been designed to inspire participation and capture the passion, emotion and determination of all our runners. The new website also enables us to deliver better content for all our partners – charities, participants and sponsors.

Our newly expanded charities team will be able to provide expertise and a genuine partnership approach. If you haven’t met the new team members already there will be opportunities to say hello in the new year. We are committed to delivering a world-class service to support charities and value your input, so please do fill in our charity survey if you’ve not already done so.

There will be more announcements to come about our events and the different ways we are looking to support our charity partners. There is much of 2020 I’m looking forward to leaving behind, but what I am taking into 2021 is our renewed commitment to supporting as many charities as possible and helping them raise as much money as possible, so we can all come back stronger.

I hope you are all able to have a restful and enjoyable festive holiday.

Kenneth
Head of Charities