JVN Blog

Come rain or shine, the Community Fun Run is happening this Sunday. It’s always a very special day in the Jewish calendar of Events. 100’s of charities will be represented by adults and children who feel passionately about their particular causes.

The blood, sweat and tears that have gone into the training for this big day is nobody’s business. Not to mention collecting the sponsorship money….though gone are the days when you went knocking on doors with jam jars. Thanks goodness for Just Giving !

This year we wanted to introduce you to two families who will be running for JVN.

Candice Woolfson is our new project director for Embrace which is a highly innovative Employee Volunteering initiative. Her job is to recruit businesses to sign up to the programme, which then allows employees to have time off volunteering for a chosen charity.

When she is not spending all the hours of the day driving this forward, she and her husband Stuart and three children Asher, Rafi and Noa have been training for the Community Fun Run.

Candice told us, ‘By running for JVN I am supporting at lot of charities in one go. I wanted to raise awareness of the wonderful work  JVN do in matching the right volunteer with the right charity. People don’t realise, but it really is quite a skill to get this right .’

She also wants to teach her children about raising money for good causes from a young age, which has already paid off as Asher is all set to pick up a Joni Jesner award for his 20 hours of volunteering. Go Asher !

Tristan Nagler first became aware of JVN a year ago when he was inspired to run for them in last year’s Community Fun Run. Tristan Nagler has since joined the JVN Advisory Board and is also a co-director of Embrace.

‘I work in the banking sector and wanted to do something meaningful with my free time so I asked my wife Elisabeth and children Asher aged 6 and Shelli aged 4 to join me this year’.

We asked Tristan what he gives his kids for breakfast, after all, it’s no mean feat running 1km at such young ages,  ‘ Let’s just say they have a power breakfast with lots of protein…’ he joked.

And talking of power breakfasts, Tristan is on the fundraising committee responsible for organising  JVN’s inaugural business breakfast with Sir Victor Blank and Lord Feldman next week. We’ll certainly be taking our calculator and notepad down to that meeting!