Local milliner collects over 100 handbags for Love Grace
Melanie May | 25 February 2020 | News
An Essex-based milliner has collected more than 100 handbags for Love Grace, the charitable initiative set up in memory of Grace Millane, who was murdered while travelling in New Zealand.
Love Grace was set up by Grace Millane’s family, who live locally to milliner Katie Vale Designs, to create a legacy in her name. In the UK as well as in New Zealand where a campaign has been running for the past fortnight, Love Grace is collecting donations of handbags and requested essential items to provide practical support for women needing refuge and a safe haven from harmful relationships. Handbags filled with these items will then be delivered to refuge centres to support women in need.
Katie Vale Designs is in Barleylands Craft Village in Essex, and owned by Katie Vale who also knows Grace’s cousin.
She said:
“We have been overwhelmed by the number of handbags donated by customers and by people who are not regular visitors to Barleylands but who want to support women in need. In the last nine months over 100 handbags of all shapes and sizes have been dropped into the shop as well as toiletries amounting to two huge boxes. It’s a cause that means a lot to many people, and I have been touched by how many have involved their children in filling and donating the bags and explaining the value of helping others through simple acts.”
In total, more than 600 bags have been collected by Love Grace since last summer and donated to three different Essex refuges including Changing Pathways, Next Chapter, Safer Steps, as well as to EDAN Lincs in Lincolnshire, The Pennine Domestic Violence Group and two more in Wales and Oxfordshire.
Each bag is tied with a white ribbon and a label saying Love Grace x.
Grace’s family said:
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“To continue Grace’s legacy, we aim to offer a small bag of help to those who suffer from violence and domestic abuse. Domestic Violence and male violence towards women is a bigger issue than people realise as it’s not talked about. We wish to draw attention to it, allow people to speak up and hopefully educate, with a view to people calling out their friends and colleagues on behaviour they don’t agree with, and to empower women to leave abusive relationships.”
Grace’s family has also been fundraising for The White Ribbon charity in the UK and in New Zealand through events run by family and friends, hockey matches played in her name and selling a bracelet ‘Grace’s Ribbon’ designed and sold by local jewellery maker LL Loves.
About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.