A ROTARY club has donated £1,600 towards a project that helps people living with dementia.

Willaston and South Wirral Rotary Club has shown its support for Dementia Together Wirral's 'Activity Box Project'.

Registered in 2018, the charity helps people living with dementia or memory loss, and their carers by supporting, entertaining and befriending.

It is run almost entirely by volunteers and before the Covid-19 pandemic was providing a wide range of activities, free of charge.

With activities having to stop, volunteers started thinking about other ways they could offer support.

Discussion amongst volunteers, and through consultation with service users – or ‘Friends’ as the charity prefers to call them – led to the Activity Box Project being launched in December.

Each loan box is filled with a range of items which is then delivered by volunteers for Friends to use in their own home by the carer and the person living with dementia.

Allan Grogan, chair of trustees at Dementia Together Wirral, said “This is an incredibly generous donation from Willaston and South Wirral Rotary Club and we are extremely grateful to them for their support."

Fiona Mosely, President of the club, added: “We are delighted to be able to support Dementia Together Wirral. We first came across the charity when I heard Allan Grogan speak about it in 2019 at another club of which I am a member.

"Dementia is something that I have personal experience of, with my father, and I know other club members also have experience either directly or through friends.

"When I learned that the charity was set up specifically to help people in Wirral, to fill a geographical gap that had arisen, I decided to propose the charity to the Rotary Club as one to support for the year 2019-20.

"Our fundraising efforts started well, then the Covid pandemic prevented most of our ideas from being brought to fruition. We decided to continue our support into 2020-21 and despite the restrictions we still managed to raise a significant amount of money through open-air second-hand book sales in the Summer, and our Santa sleigh collection.

"We are pleased that the money will be used to support the Activity Box scheme and will enable the charity to purchase and fill 25 more boxes to help local people living with dementia and their carers to stimulate and revive memories and encourage more interaction and communication”.

Items in the activity boxes can include things like colouring books and crayons, word search books, jigsaws, dominoes, playing cards and other games, plus a range of 'reminiscence' items designed to stimulate conversations between carer – usually the spouse – and the person with dementia.

The boxes also include things from the past to evoke shared memories/conversation and items like old postcards, local photo books photos of historic events and people, plus CD's, DVD's, advertisements, hairnets, dolly pegs, shaving brushes, toys, wooden spinners, and kaleidoscopes have been very popular with the recipients.

The boxes are collected by volunteers every three to four weeks and exchanged for a new box with different items.

Each box is quarantined when collected and sanitised before being redistributed.

One item which has been extremely well received are the ‘Twiddle Muffs’ included with many of the boxes – useful to keep restless hands occupied and provide visual, sensory and tactile stimulation.

Twiddle Muffs are either knitted or made using material and Dementia Together Wirral would love to hear from anybody interested in making and donating these this for future boxes.