The Mall, Wood Green has announced that it is extending its charity partnership with the Godwin Lawson Foundation (GLF) for another year.  The shopping centre joined forces with the charity last year as part of its community-orientated Mall Cares programme and raised over £,5600.

Over the last 12 months, the big-hearted shopping centre staged a number of fun events to draw in the local community and raise funds and awareness for the local charity. Popular events included henna art for Eid, a selfie mirror, a coffee and cake afternoon, shark week, a giant adult-sized ball pit, Halloween face painting and Santa’s grotto.

The Mall also used its web and social media platform to promote the GLF, placed collection buckets around the centre and made its conference room available for the charity to conduct its Peer 2 Peer workshops, a parent support group.

The GLF was established in 2012 by Yvonne Lawson to celebrate the life of her son, Godwin, who lost his life in March 2010 as part of an unprovoked knife attack. The charity, which is based in North London, works alongside schools and youth clubs to reduce knife and gun crime, which is sadly so prevalent amongst youngsters in the city.

Nominated by the public as The Mall’s charity of the year for 2019, the GLF was thrilled to discover that the shopping centre had decided to extend the partnership for a further year.

“The Mall Wood Green’s support over the last year has been amazing and has made such a difference to our work in the community,” said Yvonne Lawson, the GLF’s founder and CEO. “The Mall is one of only a few safe places for youngsters in Wood Green in Tottenham and we feel very lucky to be continuing this very special partnership with the shopping centre and its staff.”

Looking ahead, Gwendolyne Lobo, Marketing Manager for The Mall Wood Green commented: “The focus for this year is on getting the local community more involved and educating them about how to help prevent knife crime. We are planning on adding more detailed information on our website to encourage our visitors to join the initiative and have a number of exciting events organised including storytelling and book reading sessions for World Book Day and various school holiday activities. We would like to build on our successes over the last year beat last year’s fundraising total of £5,615.”

A big focus this year is National Volunteer Month, which is taking place in April as Gwendolyne explains: “We will be providing our premises to the GLF on a number of days across the month so that it can promote its work and encourage a variety of volunteers with different skills to join the charity. As well as individuals to help with fundraising activities, the charity is looking for people that can help with social media management and artwork design or that would be happy to give their time to work as mentors within schools and the community.”

The shopping centre is also hoping to encourage more retailer support for the charity and plans to raise more money for the GLF by selling merchandise and unclaimed lost property items.