Community / Filsket fundraiser pays off for riding club
A LOCAL pony club is at last able to make plans to restart lessons next year after a summer fundraising drive to help safeguard its future.
The volunteer-run Filsket Riding Club, which offers bairns aged 5-16 of all abilities twice-weekly pony riding, had been unable to generate any income since summer 2019 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Over the summer it has run a fundraising raffle through Toyota and Jim’s Garage (Shetland), which concluded at the weekend with Nancy Johnson of Eshaness the lucky winner of a brand new car.
Organisers said 2,000 tickets had been sold and several thousand pounds had been raised to get the club back up and running in May 2022.
Lisa Johnson of Filsket Riding Club said everyone involved wanted to say a “massive thank you” to the garage as well as “all the local shops and businesses that have sold raffle tickets for us for the past four months. We couldn’t have done it without you!”
“Thanks as well to our dedicated committee and volunteers for all their hard work and most of all thank you to everyone who purchased tickets,” she said.
“The money raised will be spent repairing and replacing equipment and storage facilities, hiring an instructor, and most excitingly of all sourcing new ponies for the bairns to learn to ride on.”
Lisa said the club was indebted to the dedicated volunteers who have cared for the ponies throughout the pandemic.
“For most sporting groups lockdown meant putting their equipment away in a cupboard to wait it out,” she said. “For a pony club it meant individual members taking personal responsibility for the pony’s welfare and personally covering all the costs involved while the club was unable to run.
“We are extremely grateful to have such wonderful volunteers and so look forward to getting back to lessons.”
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