The Better Together for Healthy Bone Marrow Project, is a three year project funded by the National Lottery Community Fund. We sat down with the Project Manager, Claire Baggott, to find out more!

Could you tell us a bit about the Better Together project and what you hope to achieve?

This project brings together six small but mighty charities, allowing us to work together to deliver improved support for our communities – people affected by a range of related rare bone marrow failures that are not caused by cancer. The wonderful thing about this project is that it will help the seven alliance partners become stronger and more resilient, which in turn will allow for improved and more sustainable support for their communities. The benefits of this project should live on, far beyond the three- year life of the project itself.

This project is a collaboration between six different organisations. How did it come about and why is it so important for charities to work together?

The charities involved in the project started holding regular meetings as an alliance some years ago, as we realised how similar the needs of our communities were. We felt there was an opportunity to learn from each other by replicating successes, and avoiding any pitfalls! While we were meeting regularly, we always found that there was so much we wanted to achieve as organisations - but of course our work was constantly limited by our our small organisations’ limited resources.

When we discovered that The National Lottery Community Fund was awarding grants for partnership projects - we saw an opportunity to invest in really levelling up all of our charities together, funding some of the “big dream” projects that we had long spoken about, and building us up to be more sustainable and able to do more in the future.

Charities work together collaboratively more often than people might realise! Often this partnership work is less visible to the general public, because they most often hear from charities via fundraising campaigns - when naturally, charities tend to talk about themselves!

Everyone is so passionate about doing the best job they can do, it’s natural to share resources, ideas and learnings with other teams who want the same thing.

One of the things that’s most unusual about this partnership is we’re also creating a fundraising campaign together - Super Rare. We’re able to do this without worries about competing for income, because as small rare disease charities, we know from experience that the people who fundraise and donate to us will be people affected by our specific condition and the people supporting them. While there is crossover in our conditions - it’s not likely, for example, that someone primarily affected by Shwachman Diamond Syndrome is ever going to decide to fundraise for the Aplastic Anaemia Trust instead of SDS UK - so we don’t have to worry about competing for income.

How can people get involved in this project?

The Better Together alliance partners have already launched their first collaborative fundraising campaign – Super Rare 2023. Fundraising events will be being help throughout February and March by community members supporting each of the charities. Please keep an eye out early next year and visit super-rare.org to find out more and to set up your own fundraising event.

What are you most excited about?

I am thrilled to be the Project Manager for such an exciting and far-reaching project. I am most excited about what it will feel like at the end of year three, as we look back and see how far each of the charities have come and the difference they will have made to the communities they support.