On the 7th 0f February the Forum welcomed its guest speaker Matthew Jameson, a fund-raising manager with Macmillan Cancer Support.  His organisation was established in 1911 when Douglas MacMillan was left £10 in his father’s will to set up a charity to support cancer sufferers having himself died of the disease.  The purpose of the charity is to support everyone diagnosed with cancer and also their family and friends.  This support can take the form of financial help but also advice and comfort to sufferers.  Macmillan nurses are normally recruited from the NHS and work within hospitals but are totally funded by the charity.  The charity also acts as a pressure group to change attitudes or procedures when necessary, one example being to try and withdraw parking charges for patients making regular visits to hospitals.  Matthew gave us a number of case studies of situations where the Macmillan charity has been of assistance. The annual budget of MacMillan is very large as they run an information centre in most large hospitals and fully provide the salaries of all their nurses.  Matthew related a number of the ways in which funds are raised, the best known being the Macmillan coffee mornings, in 2015 these numbered 380,000 in the UK raising £25million.  Matthew himself raised a large sum when he undertook a sky-dive.  The local MacMillan Support organiser is David Bailey, a Forum member, who informed us how we could get involved in the fund raising.  Mike Earle proposed a vote of thanks and members contributed to a collection as they left the meeting.