BLOG: A surprise visitor to Port Sunlight River Park

In the barrage of emails, meetings and projects that working life sometimes becomes, it can be very easy to forget the bigger picture and remember the reasons why we choose to do what we do.

When I joined the Land Trust in March 2018 it was because I wanted to work for an organisation that makes a real difference to people’s lives. I believed in our five charitable objectives of health, education, economy, environment and biodiversity and community cohesion and wanted to play a part delivering these to the communities around our sites.

Throughout my time at the Trust I’ve seen the positive impact we have on so many of our sites first hand, but particularly on our site at Port Sunlight River Park.

Since taking ownership of Port Sunlight in 2014, and working in partnership with our managing partners, Autism Together, the site has become a fantastic community resource and in April it was fantastic to attend the official opening of our new heritage visitor centre – just the latest achievement in what has been an incredible transformation of the site under the Land Trust’s management.

The highlight of the day (apart from the opening of the building obviously!) was the surprise attendance at the event of local boxing world champion, Callum Smith.

I was lucky enough to be able to spend a bit of time with Callum and interview him for our social media channels and it was fascinating to get an insight into his motivations and why the cause means so much to him.

Callum’s younger sister is autistic. Every time he fights he does so with the word ‘Autism’ on his shorts to try and raise awareness.

He turned up at the event because he just wanted to lend his support. He had no interest in publicity. He simply wants to play his part in making a difference, not only for his sister but for so many other people with Autism and their friends and family.

For someone with an incredibly busy schedule (at the time of the event he was in training for his debut fight at Madison Square Gardens) to make time to come and support events of this nature can be a real difference maker, and also served as a timely reminder to me about how important the work the Land Trust does and the impact we are having.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Aaron Gales joined the Land Trust in March 2018 as a Communications and Marketing specialist.