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Concordia Winter 2022

Development and Alumni Relations Update

team spoke to were hugely generous, especially considering the prevailing financial pressures, giving over £120k over the next four years to bursaries, the Cricket Centre, and other projects for music, drama and sport. Since we started telephone fundraising in 2013, you have given over £500k to the school. Much of this support has been through regular giving, which has made such a difference to our ability to plan. For bursaries – usually a seven-year commitment – this is particularly important. As well as financial support, so many people offered their time as volunteers, particularly as speakers for careers. The callers themselves also benefitted from some hugely valuable advice. To celebrate the milestone of a decade of calling, and over £500k in gifts received, we are bringing together callers from each of the six campaigns for a special reunion this year. We have seen a record number of benefactors make their first gift to the school this year, and a record number of people supporting overall. OMTs and parents have also been hugely generous with their time and expertise, supporting our careers programme. Whether being aYoung Enterprise business mentor, helping with interview practice, speaking at an event like our recent Medicine and Dentistry Convention, taking part in our first ever Careers Week – delivered entirely online – you have done so much to help inspire and guide the

reunion for 1992. The two groups took different approaches to their reunions, although both held tours of the school, followed by drinks in the Inner Quad, before a meal in the OMT Clubhouse. Another common feature of the two events was the presence of teaching staff, both past and present, who welcomed their former charges back to the school. OMTs and staff commented on how enjoyable it was to see one another after a period of 20-30 years! Please do get in touch if you are interested in organising a reunion for your year-group – we can help with much of the organisation and communication, but we won’t impose an event on you; we would like it to be your event, so the format is for you to dictate. One of the wonderful things about the reunions has been the opportunity to see so many former staff back at the school. The Triennial in 2021 was also an occasion on which we saw many familiar faces from the SCR alumni community. This year, to ensure that this community of former staff, who have done so much for the school, can stay connected with us and with one-another, we established an online platform for news, events and a contact directory, so that those among the staff alumni group who wish to remain engaged with life at MTS, and to return for events like the reunions and the Triennial, can do so. Over the summer, we held our sixth Telephone Fundraising Campaign. The OMTs and parents our calling

It has been a busy and eventful year for the Development and Alumni Relations team, dominated by fundraising for the Julian Hill Cricket Centre. The generosity of a small number of OMTs and friends of the school meant that by May 2022 we were able to launch a public fundraising appeal for the building. We had raised just in excess of £1.5m when we launched our campaign, and have now received further support from the whole community, taking this total to just over £2m. This early success was enough to convince the Governing Body that the project was viable, and in October 2022 we broke ground on the site at school. There is much still to do to raise a further £700k, but this is a wonderful start to the campaign. You can read more about the project and the campaign in a separate article on page 46. It’s quite hard to believe that this time last year there were many of our usual events that were still not possible because of Covid restrictions. The year has therefore been a hybrid of online and in-person events, and we have seen that there remains a place in our programme for virtual events despite now being able to gather, particularly our series of talks, MTS Together, and for many of our careers events. That said, there is nothing quite like welcoming OMTs back to their school, so we were delighted to hold two year-group reunions over the summer: a 20-year reunion for the Class of 2002 and a 30-year

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493 Donors (an increase of 99 from 2021)

2040 Volunteering hours

141 volunteers

Development