If you come from Blackpool you’ll most likely know about Sue. You didn’t read about her in any list of Britain’s deep pocket philanthropists. You don’t know Sue as a major employer, an entrepreneur, a local-person-made-good celebrity. Nothing like that. You’ll know Sue from that piece in The Blackpool Gazette. Or it might have been that Channel 5 news feature during the Covid pandemic back in November 2021. If you are a Facebook follower you might have seen one of her many posts there. Just as likely, you heard a bit of chat at your local pub or in the Ibbison Court Community Centre on Central Drive in the heart of the town.
Sue is not from Blackpool, not a Sandgrown’un, as people born and raised in the town are known. In fact, she’s only lived there for 10 years. Sandgrown’un or not, the people of Blackpool don’t care. They know Sue’s story. They know who she is.
Thirty years ago, Sue was living in Shropshire, loving and caring for her one-year-old daughter, Kim, whilst awaiting the birth of her second child. The joy of the birth of a second daughter quickly turned to grief when her new-born, Kaylan, died after only two days. Kaylan’s organs hadn’t been formed properly and nothing could be done to save her.
Sue dealt with her grief by resolving to raise £2,000 so that hospital equipment for critically ill babies could be replaced and upgraded. Family, friends and the local community responded to her challenge. The bingo and barn dance that she organised raised £2,500 and Sue, still mourning the loss of her baby, felt she had done what she could.
The family move to Blackpool followed in 2015, a fresh start, a whole new way of life. If Sue did have one concern it was her brother, Malcolm. On the one hand, he was like a dad to Kim, she said. On the other, he had long suffered from mental illness. Hard as she tried, Sue often struggled to get through to him, to make him realise how much he was loved. Only two years after Sue moved to Blackpool, Malcolm took his own life.
Though Sue knew and understood that Malcolm had deliberately distanced himself from her and the family before he died, she wondered if someone else, a stranger, another voice, might have kept him alive. As she had done when she lost Kylan, Sue took action in her grief, this time to save other Malcolms. At first, she placed her own notes at Blackpool’s best-known locations for those intent on taking their own lives, notes that read ‘Just because you are struggling, doesn’t mean you are failing. We all need help sometimes. Call this number.’
But instead of speaking to The Samaritans, anonymous callers got in touch with Sue or came to her candle-lit vigil outside St John’s Church on the day of Malcolm’s birthday. Sue had extended an open invitation online to anyone suffering from depression.
Sue doesn’t say at what point she realised that so many across Blackpool needed help to cope with all that life was throwing at them. She doesn’t talk about individual cases, about those behind on rent, the women in abusive relationships, the suicidal, the food bank dependents, the people whose benefits have been lost or stopped for one reason or another, the mothers and sisters like her who had lost a baby, a brother, those on the verge of breaking point. She doesn’t talk about them, nor does she care how they got there. What matters to her is that something is done to help them, that those people on the edge know they have not run out of options. In 2020, the first year of the Covid pandemic, she created a charity for them called, appropriately, Blackpool’s Voice.
Sue’s charity is for everyone. Just as the broken and vulnerable of Blackpool now know that their voice will be heard when they contact Sue, so the word has spread in the town and beyond that Sue can make items and money donated go further.
Day-to-day Sue has no idea what will be donated next for the food bank she runs, or for the Blackpool’s Voice shop, or for her late-night fundraising online auctions. And all of that is in addition to the free counselling she offers, often connecting individuals and families with the services and specialist help they need.
Sue doesn’t have time for labels, not for those in desperate need who turn to her, and not for herself. She’s not a philanthropist, not in the way many understand one to be, distributing money from a deep pocket. Sue still wouldn’t want to be called one, even though, as most actual philanthropists do, she is challenging the status quo, addressing a critical problem, taking a long term-view, not waiting for others to act, delivering a solution and sticking to it come what may.
Where Sue would agree is in saying that she is not alone. A nation of Sues does exist, a nation of philanthropists like her in everything but name. And like Sue they are re-defining the meaning, the understanding and the application of philanthropy by what they do, not by how much money they put in. Whether their focus is local, national, international, social, cultural, environmental, whatever it might be, they don’t have time for labels either.