Racing Welfare delighted by response to Virtual Yorkshire Open Day

Racing Welfare, which has been hit by a Covid-19 ‘double whammy’ of huge demand for its services and limited chances to raise funds, was thrilled by the response to its Virtual Yorkshire Open Day.

A total of 24 trainers from across the county threw open their doors to the public on what should have been Malton Open Day via YouTube videos, while online visitors also got to see behind the scenes of most other aspects of the sport.

“We’re delighted,” said Racing Welfare head of fundraising Mark Loades. “We’d had over 40,000 views of all the videos by mid-afternoon and our website has had 5,000 views today alone.

“We’ve collected around £1,000 in voluntary £2.50 donations when people registered and the total for the online auction, which runs until September 24, is now past £37,000.

“We’ve also seen an amazing amount of goodwill, with trainers and racecourses coming together, and the comments on social media have been fantastic.”

The annual Middleham Open Day on Good Friday was also lost and Racing Welfare chief executive Dawn Goodfellow pointed to the huge challenge the charity has been left with.

Dawn Goodfellow: the chief executive of Racing Welfare says the charity has 'never been more needed'Credit: Edward Whitaker

“For us as a charity they are fundraising events and we've been hugely impacted by the inability to run face-to-face fundraising events this year,” she said.

“At the same time that we cannot raise funds, our services have never been more needed. We've been busier than ever. Last year was a record year for us in terms of the number of people we helped at 2,500. This year we'd helped 3,500 before the end of June.

"Looking ahead we had two or three fundraising events we were hoping we might be able to run, including one at Doncaster at the November Handicap meeting, but I think that's just going to be possible.”

Goodfellow also believes the loss of the two open days has robbed racing of a key promotional opportunity and said: “It's always so good for racing for people to be able to see behind the scenes and talk to those who look after the horses.

"You wouldn't get the chance to do that with any other sport and I'm sure there are a lot of racegoers now who were originally captured by those sort of opportunities.”

Click here to see Racing Welfare's online auction

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