Intu Braehead Helps Students at Home and Abroad
When students at Gleniffer High School reached out to the management at intu Breahead, they only hoped to secure a prize for a charity raffle. The students were doing their best to pull together the funds to decorate a few classrooms at Dzenza Primary School in Malawi.
General manager (operations) at intu Braehead, Gary Turnbull explained how the center was moved to help them do much more than that. “The more we found out about their project and spoke to the pupils, we realised how much passion they had for what they were doing,” he said. “We decided to do more than just give them a raffle prize as some money became available for a good cause and together we could so much more.”
So much more, in this case, means the students’ plan to decorate has grown into a full-scale building operation. The shopping center’s £8000 donation helped expand the project. Gleniffer High is now working with Scottish charity Classrooms for Malawi to organize the construction of four new classrooms for the school, as well as a toilet block for female students. Construction will kick off in the spring, with local tradesmen on the team and local materials used in the project.
The students may not be directly involved in the construction at this point, but they’ll contribute to it next summer. 24 fifth- and sixth-year Gleniffer High students will visit the school in Malawi next summer to put their own finishing touches on it.
Anna Spence, 17, is one of the pupils involved in the project. “Thanks to the money from intu Braehead, we can make a huge difference to the lives of pupils on the other side of the world,” she said. “When we started to get involved in raising money to go to Malawi, we didn’t imagine the project would end up so big and achieving so much. It’s gone beyond our wildest dreams.”
Image: Gleniffer High head girl, Anna Spence and Gary Turnbull, general manager at intu Braehead.
