It is close to two years ago that Paul Burgum first met with the Lancaster family in view of assisting to raise funds for the family to aid the development of their son. Cole suffers with four limb cerebral palsy and the initial fundraising was going to be towards improvements to their back garden for a safe play area.
It was agreed that that year’s BCT Fun Day would donate profits to help raise funds for this project. However it was soon realised that what the family really required was improvements to the family home. Paul decided that the group would thus raise funds towards an extension to the family home. Paul himself was formerly a self-employed carpenter and joiner and felt confident that he could assist the family both through fundraising and also by giving his own time to any following build.
Around the same time Paul decided to leave his career as a joiner behind and follow his dream of setting up his own Social Enterprise. The informal group behind the Billingham Charity Trophy Fun Day became BCT Events CIC and has since evolved once again to its current and final name of BCT Aspire. Paul decided to help the fundraising along he would undertake a fundraising walk from Portsmouth back to Billingham without either money or real support. This again went towards the project as well as the Great North Air Ambulance.
Sadly that the year the Fun Day actually made a loss for the first time and the amount of money raised was nowhere near enough to really assist in the extension that was the ideal scenario for the family. At this point Paul decided to pull together all his own contacts and attempt to get the extension built himself alongside his father Michael. It took a while to pull everything together and at some points everybody actually believed that the project was just too big to become a reality,
“I actually felt like I had let the family down at this point and was genuinely disappointed, some people had faded away and I questioned the size of the project. However I really wanted to get the project completed as it really meant a lot to me personally. I know that talk is cheap and when I say things it really bothers me if I don’t see them through to completion. Sometimes I realise that think of things that would seem unrealistic to many people. However people always seem to come forward and support our various projects. “
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