'So grateful' – Outgoing Acorns Children's Hospice boss writes an open letter

I am writing this two days before I step down as Chief Executive of Acorns Children’s Hospice after six years in the role.

My most important remaining duty is to thank those who have done so much to support our children’s hospice service over what has been an incredibly challenging and unpredictable few years.

I am therefore extremely grateful to have been given the opportunity to thank the people who are responsible for what will certainly be the greatest two achievements of my time at Acorns. Both are, of course, related.

The first achievement was finding a way to avert the closure for financial reasons of our Black Country children’s hospice in Walsall back in 2019, and the second was that we were able to keep its doors open to local children and families every single day of the two years of the pandemic. Without the first achievement, of course, there could never have been the second.

And the people I have to thank are you, the local community in the Black Country. Inspired by what you saw and heard about the importance of the Acorns care service to the families that needed it, you really took our charity to your hearts.

You helped campaign to bring about increased funding for children’s hospices from the NHS. You then directly donated the additional money we needed to be certain of our long-term future in Walsall.

You moved us to tears with your kindness and your generosity. We had young children turn up at the hospice reception in Walsall to donate their pocket money. I remember meeting a pensioner who had taken three buses across town to bring us £500, what she called her “rainy day money”. We learned of jumble sales, fun runs, and pub quizzes being organized across the Black Country. There were appeals and collections in the region’s churches, mosques, temples and gurdwaras. Politicians red and blue united to support our campaign.

Within a week of launching the appeal, Erica Brown, a former colleague of mine at Acorns, announced she would donate her entire inheritance from her mother to the appeal. This incredible act inspired many others to give too, and soon we were confident that we would be able to keep our hospice in Walsall open, just a few months after all hope had seemed lost.

I want to say that none of this would have been possible without the Express & Star. When we first saw an outside chance in July 2019 that we could save the hospice if we launched an appeal, I travelled with a colleague to Wolverhampton, and requested a meeting with the editors. I explained that we thought a fundraising appeal might capture the imagination of the Black Country community, but we wouldn’t be able to do it without the support of the region’s famous local paper. I want to thank Mark Drew and his team for agreeing right away, without a moment’s hesitation, to support us.

What the Express & Star’s support allowed us to do was to tell you our stories, as well as ask you to support our appeal. A children’s hospice like Acorns is above all a place where we see and experience every day and with real intensity the emotions that make us human – our hopes, our fears, our joy and our sadness. The shock and tragic injustice of childhood illness and death. But also the courage, the happiness of precious time spent together, the determination to make every day count, to make special memories together.

Through the Express and Star, the people who used our Acorns care service told you their own stories. No two people did more to raise awareness and to inspire support for our appeal than Mark and Jen, parents of Isabella Lyttle, who died in April 2019 after years with a brain tumour. Isabella really loved Acorns, and took regular stays with us over many years as she underwent treatment for her illness. She particularly loved our Arts and Crafts room. Two months after Isabella tragically died, we had to announce that the hospice in Walsall would need to close, for financial reasons.

Mark and Jen simply couldn’t bear to think that our care service wouldn’t be available to other children like Isabella in the future. So they decided to lead our campaign to save our children’s hospice in Walsall. I travelled with Mark to Westminster, and watched him inspire a meeting of 10 or so Black Country MPs that the hospice could and must be saved. I saw Mark and Jen tell their story on BBC Breakfast and on the Today programme, and on Midlands Today and ITV Central News. So that the Black Country community in turn would understand how important it was to keep open the only children’s hospice in your region.

These two wonderful parents, supported by a wide network of friends and co-workers, did so much for our campaign that we have named a new arts and crafts room after their daughter. It will be called Isabella’s Place. It is being built as the centrepiece of a major refurbishment of the Walsall hospice, the first in its 20-year history, made possible by how you have all supported Acorns over the past three years.

Thanks to the success of the appeal in 2019, we were confident by Christmas that year that it would be saved. I have re-read my papers and emails from that time, and my New Year messages spoke of the importance of a new year defined by calm and stability for our hospice teams, and for the families that use our service in the Black Country, after all the uncertainty of the year before.

Instead, we got the pandemic, and a period quite without precedent in all our lives. It was scary and shocking for us, as it was for you. But thanks to our courageous and dedicated people, we were able to keep our Walsall hospice open every day of the two-year crisis. We took in some of the region’s most poorly children, and continued to offer end of life care whenever sad circumstance required.

We are very proud of what we were able to achieve, and very glad that after all the love and support you had shown us the year before, we at Acorns were able, in the thick of the pandemic, to do what was most important to all of you – to ensure that the most vulnerable members of your local community would have somewhere to go, and somewhere to be cared for.

As for me, I have learned so much from our Acorns family and from the local community here in the Black Country.

I will never forget your generosity and your kindness, nor the determination and optimism of people like the parents of Isabella Lyttle, and other children who need our Acorns care.

I would like to thank all of you, and the Express and Star, with all my heart.