Brew News - the Yorkshire Tea blog

As another year comes to an end, so does this year’s Great British Tea Party. We’d just like to thank everyone who got involved, whether it was by throwing a party to raise funds, buying cakes at a bake-stall, or doing what Vicky Hart and her friend Claire have done here – posing behind our Wallace & Gromit photoboard and posting their picture on our Facebook page!

From the barge parties we threw earlier in the year to our own staff tea party here at Yorkshire Tea HQ, we’ve had loads of fun and we hope you have too – and the fact that the funds raised will help Wallace & Gromit’s Children’s Foundation to support sick children in UK hospitals and hospices is surely the icing on the cake!

We’ll be back in the new year with details of how much we raised. In the meantime, thanks again to everyone who joined in. We hope you had fun – here’s to next year and Merry Christmas to you all from everyone at Yorkshire Tea!

ps – you’ll find even more Wallace & Gromit photoboard pics here

Mick and Andy from our factory have been looking for adventure and heading for the highway this month. In a bid to raise money for two charities, the Children’s Heart Foundation and Help For Heroes, they embarked on a motorbike endurance challenge.

The biking-mad pair travelled over 1000 miles in 24 hours, setting off from Taylors at lunchtime and arriving back in time for lunch the following day (stopping for breaks and sleep of course!). Their charity road trip saw them travel via Lands End and Dover, raising over £600. We’d just like to say congratulations to both on a safe return and successful trip!

These rainforest pictures were sent to Sam in our PR team by pupils from Ben Rhydding Primary School in Ilkley. She’d been invited to talk at their assembly about the Yorkshire Rainforest Project, our pledge to save an area of rainforest the size of Yorkshire. Not forgetting her trip to the part of Peru where we’re currently working with local communities to help them protect their forest. Here’s what she told us about visiting the school:

“Ben Rhydding Primary School very kindly invited me to come along and talk about my time in Peru with the Ashaninka community who call the rainforest home, and while I was there they showed me these fab pictures they’d made of rainforest scenes. Their Year 4 classes have been learning all about the rainforest, from the plants and animals that live there to the people that depend on the forest for their food, shelter and livelihoods. They used what they learned to put together a brilliant assembly, dressing up as rainforest animals to re-enact the story of the ‘Great Kapok Tree’, and to tell their school about the wonders of the Amazon.

It was great to see children so interested in the rainforest and understanding the impact that it has on all of us. Some of the pupils gave us their thoughts on why the rainforest is so important. As well as giving us oxygen to breathe and taking away CO2, they said that the rainforest gives us life saving materials we can’t get anywhere else and provides a home to lots of beautiful animals and plants, as well as many people who live in harmony with the rainforest.

While I was staying with the Ashaninka communities in the Amazon, I had the chance to visit a couple of schools.  Just as in England, the children learn about why it is important to look after the environment. They’re taught that it’s their forest, and their home – and if they don’t look after it, who will?

Their teacher told me that that many of the children worry about their future and how they will be able to sustain themselves with so many threats to their forests, from logging, oil mining and coca production.

I hope we can get more schools finding out about the Yorkshire Rainforest Project. If teachers or pupils want to get in touch, they are welcome to e-mail us at pr@bettysandtaylors.co.uk – and we also have some rainforest facts and activity pages that we can send across, as well as ideas on how to protect the rainforest.”