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Published on Monday 10 October 2011 11:11

Charity Dreamgirls

Five Years of Magic

Victoria Theatre

This was the fifth and final event of what had been a hectic week for the high-achieving Dreamgirls, celebrating five years of raising awareness for northern charities.

It gave Kate Hardcastle and her fellow Dreamgirls Jenny Smith and Kate Peters the chance to strut their stuff with the stars who, together with the versatile band directed from the keyboard by Jon Chamberlain, and compere Terry Christian, had all given their time for free.

Sporting typically fashionable outfits they accompanied their guests as groovy backing singers and themselves sang pop hits from five decades, from the 1950s to the 1990s.

From the 50s, trim, dapper Ricky Vallance sang swing numbers and his 1960 No1 Tell Laura I Love Her.

Tremolo Chip Hawkes, father of the dishy Chesney, came across as engagingly self-deprecating with his catchy 60s contributions, including Silence is Golden.

Tiny Angie Brown, of the big, big voice, celebrated soul and funk 70s-style with a knockout version of RESPECT.

Katrina, minus her Waves but in terrific voice, really got the audience going with her 1983 hit Walking On Sunshine and her 1997 Eurovision winner Love Shine A Light.

Orientale Dance Company, winners of Friday’s Talent Show, delighted with their graceful belly dancing and there was a glorious finale featuring everyone who had taken part.

The information videos need to be improved but otherwise this was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, raising awareness for Overgate Hospice, the Retail Trust and the Willow Foundation.

Julia Anderson

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As a celebrated former pupil (her work with the Charity Dreamgirls, awareness and fundraising for charities, and award-winning business figure), Kate was invited to be part of the spectacular concert, held at the Victoria Theatre, Halifax.

Kate sang the 1995 classic ‘You’ve got a friend in me’, originally by Randy Newman, with Jon Chamberlain (of the Soul & Motown Allstars) on piano.

Brooksbank School’s original building on Victoria Road was formally opened in September 1911.  Over the past one hundred years, more facilities have been added to form the large comprehensive school seen today.

After achieving this fantastic award Kate went on to win Overall Business Woman of the Year against 8 other candidates – the judges said: “We greatly admire Kate’s attitude as she also battles a debilitating illness, endometriosis, which means Kate often suffers considerable pain. Kate has clearly made it her mission to prove that any individual can achieve great things if they set their heart to it.”

She was also highly commended in the Not-For-Profit category for her work with the Charity Dreamgirls and IWP’s ‘Access for All’ programme which has assisted numerous Yorkshire-based entrepreneurs and charities.

The week, which consisted of 5 events to celebrate 5 years ending with a fantastic 5 Decades of Magic Concert with 5 legendary celebrities, is claimed to be a national first for its theme of ‘5s’.

We need to say a HUGE thank you to everyone involved, the celebrities that shared their time to help us – Katrina (Katrina & The Waves), Terry Christian, Ricky Valance, Chip Hawkes, Angie Brown, Liz Green, Tanya Vital and Sophie Powles and all of the amazing local individuals that donated their time and resources to our cause, including; Industry UK, Graphic Evolution, The Woolshops Halifax, Forward Ladies, Network SHE Yorkshire, Beau & Joli, The Vinery, Kevan Jon, Farah POP, Left Bank, Simply Devine, Shoushi, Bibis, Loreal, The Batley Frontier, The Venue and The Cotton Factory.

This list goes to show how local people can create phenomenal results when they support a community cause – we’re just excited to see what 2012 holds for us now!

A Fashion Celebration!

The first of our 5 events the Fabulous Fashion Show celebrated local fashion and designers showing that we don’t need to hit London to find some of the best fashion in the UK. The show, opened by Halifax-based designer Kevan Jon, treated the audience to an array of luxurious fabrics, intricate designs and Kevan’s signature back corseting which hug the female form.

A modern twist of nudes and greys followed with Halifax-based boutique Shoushi, whose spectacular ranges have been sourced exclusively for the boutique by owner Judith. The store, based at The Crystal Rooms opposite the Victoria Theatre offers the people of West Yorkshire unique fashion at affordable prices, with a friendly service.

Simply Devine were just that, as they showcased their handmade dresses and exclusive hat and fascinators which ranges for the perfect petite to beautifully large! Combined with the wonderfully crafted bridal collection by Kevan Jon and spectators were in heaven!

The audience were transported back in time with Farah POP, whose collections celebrated modern fashion with vintage, classic cuts. The team at Farah POP have been touring many vintage fashion fairs and have recently opened a boutique in Huddersfield.

Left Bank impressed with their reworked vintage clothing, a service that sees the designers at the boutique take vintage clothing from any decade and bring it into the 21st century by reworking the pieces, creating one offs for their clientele.

The highlight of the evening saw compere, Kate Hardcastle, give away VIP tickets to the audience by asking them to shout and scream, those with the loudest lungs received the tickets! Definitely not a traditional fashion show!

Yorkshire’s Definitely Got Talent!

Friday night saw the Dreamgirls take over The Batley Frontier – an iconic, well-loved venue – to host Yorkshire’s Got Talent. We definitely proved that!

With a fantastic celebrity judging panel to offer comments to our acts the show was every bit ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ (minus Simon Cowell). The amazing Liz Green offered well rounded, constructive advice with all acts in awe of her music knowledge, whilst Tanya Vital and Sophie Powles (of Emmerdale) were certainly entertained by the variety of acts on offer. Our founder and original Dreamgirl Kate Hardcastle used her natural wit and Yorkshire warmth to compliment each act.

The show was opened by the amazing band ‘Cherie’s Melody’ headed by Melody and Cherie Gears whose eclectic style and laid-back tones prompted Liz Green to muse “it was like sitting in a smoky jazz club”.

Then for the acts in the competition, the fantastic Jonathan Wormald took to the stage with guitar in tow playing one of his own compositions, followed by the beautiful and classically talented Berni Byrne on Irish Harp. Two dance troupes went head-to-head with MalfunKtion mixing traditional and modern dance to create a high-energy routine, whilst Orientale Dance Company entertained the audience with tradition Egyptian belly dancing.

After many a deliberation Liz Green announced the winners as a ‘unanimous’ decision – Orientale Dance Company took the title as winner of Yorkshire’s Got Talent and went on to perform at the Dreamgirls 5th Annual Concert where they received rave reviews!

The charity Dreamgirls celebrates five years with five events
05 October 2011

This week the charity Dreamgirls are celebrating five years since they first launched, in that time they’ve done some amazing work which doesn’t always mean making the most money.

Dreamgirls is something different, something which the founder Kate believes is the first to be done in the UK. They help smaller, lesser known charities to raise awareness and some money.

Founder Kate Hardcastle splits her time between being a mother, daughter, sister and wife and running her own business, which helps struggling businesses get back on their feet.

Times have never been harder for charities, people have less money, they pots for grants and funding have been reduced and there seems to be more and more people who need help.

For five years Dreamgirls have been working with the less ‘sexy’ charities to try and raise their profiles and this week is a real celebration of that.

There are 180,000 charities in the UK fighting each other to get the most coverage and the most donations, so each year Dreamgirls picks three to work with and get their message across to as many people as possible.

I caught up with Kate who tells us all about it….

How did you come up with this concept?

For us to have done five years is a big thing
Kate Hardcastle
Well five years ago; I’ve always been doing fundraising work and five years ago one of my relatives died from a stroke and when I was talking to people about it, people knew about strokes but didn’t really know anything about what caused them and I knew that something needed to be done to raise awareness of it.

Everyone seemed to know about cancer and no one seemed to know about strokes and when I spoke to the Stroke Association they said that they really struggle with awareness and I thought, well that’s got to be something because if we raise awareness for this charity, not only are we going to help them help the people who suffer but we might help people prevent something in the future and that’s when I realised how challenging an issue we had because there are so many charities and not enough people know about the majority of them, so that kind of gave me the idea then and I started investigating other charities that were doing really great work and good jobs but people didn’t know anything about them.

How do you decide which charities you’re going to help?

They choose us because we raise awareness predominantly. You’ve got to imagine if we do a collection at events, some of our events we collect money for the charities, it’s going to be a collection made up of a lot of ten pences and 20 pences, if that makes sense, so you’re not going to suddenly get thousands and thousands of pounds because you’re talking to people who that 20 pence will be a massive amount for them. So, when you’re doing an event like that some charities, totally understandably, their concern is funds, they just need funds and we’re not the right charity because we’re about getting to loads and loads of people with a message.

The charities that tend to understand what we do, which is raising awareness for an illness or a charity that’s got a more difficult message, they’ve heard about us and they know that we’ll do a good job with the public and we do it in an upbeat way as well. We don’t have lots of sad messages, we try and get people, because life’s really hard as it is at the moment for everyone, and if you get people talking about very negative things or very challenging things with them it doesn’t make people feel good.

So, like this weekend, we’ve got Katrina from Katrina and the Waves and she’ll sing Walking on Sunshine and everyone will be singing their heads off and stuff and then we’ll put a video on. But you know it’ll be an upbeat message, talking about the good stuff the charities have done and try and present the message in a good way. Then people still take the messages away but it’s not as down beat, it’s not as challenging. Because we all feel that life is as hard as it is at the minute anyway.

This week your celebrating five years, congratulations by the way, and you’re helping three different charities. Tell us a bit about each of them.

I can’t believe it, I have a job and I’m a mum, sister, daughter and wife and then try and do this for 1,825 days it will be on Saturday, I can’t believe we’ve actually done it. And it’s felt like it because it’s morning, noon and night there’s no rest from it. And obviously we do it for free, we don’t get any money from it whatsoever, in fact it costs us money because we have to pay to put things on and get places and take time off work, so I’ve not had a holiday for ages. For us to have done five years is a big thing.

This year we’re working with three charities, that have been affected by the recession in a big way and that’s what we wanted to focus on, people that have really struggled.

One of them is the Retail Trust, so there’s three million people affected by positions in retail and perhaps losing their job because of the recession. A lot of retailers are going out of business at the moment. So the Retail Trust provide counselling and support and loans for people who work in retail, or linked to retail and need help. There’s some very sad stories, people who’ve actually had a stroke or a big collapse at work and they may not have the right health care finances in place, things to support them.

We’re also working with the Willow Foundation. If someone at my age in their thirties gets a terminal illness, which God forbid it’s such an awful thing to think about, but it happens. There are a lot of charities that cater for young people who get a terminal illnesses and a lot of hospices and they’re also a lot of hospices for older people, you know perhaps in their 60s, 70s and 80s that might get a terminal illness. But when you’re my age there are not that many charities focused on making the best of what time you have left and the Willow Foundation help to make dreams come true at that life stage. Sadly because children’s charities are always so hard hitting and appealing, that should absolutely be the case, but there is also a big requirement for people, if you get a terminal illness at any point in life it’s a horrific thing to deal with so we want to try and raise awareness for them because obviously it’s still as hard whatever age you are.

And the final one, we always choose a more local charity because a lot of the events are based in Yorkshire, and we’ve chosen a hospice in Yorkshire that’s celebrating 30 years and a lot of the charity Dreamgirls are in their thirties, so they’ve been going as long as we have been around really. We chose them because they want to spread the message that the hospice, particularly their’s, isn’t somewhere where you would go and pass away really. So we’re doing an awareness on some of the fun things they do and again they’re making wishes come true. If you wake up and decide that you want a jam donut or wake up and decide that you want to do clay mouldings because that’s something that you’ve always wanted to do, they try and make that happen and that’s the part of the hospice that we’re supporting.

What sort of things have you got planned for the week then?

Probably too much actually. But we’ve got five events. It started with a fashion show with a difference, we used real-life models. On Wednesday (tonight) we’ve got Vintage Cinema night because it’s 50 years of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and we’re going to have all vintage papparzzi and cars and red carpet. So you’re going to get to go in like you’re in Hollywood in the 1950s.

Then on Thursday there is something totally different, Never Mind the Buzzers which is based on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, which is a quiz but its got a live band and everything it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s going to be really good fun. Friday night is Yorkshire’s Got Talent, where we’ve got celebrity judges judging a version of Britain’s Got Talent really, all kinds of acts Belly Dancing and all sorts.

Then Saturday is the one that we do every year, it’s our big annual concert, but it’s like five times the size this year and can’t actually believe it in terms of the price. It costs £5 a ticket and you’ve got five celebrities playing five decades of music. We’ve actually got Ricky Valance who’s come out of retirement to come and do Tell Laura I Love Her, which is amazing. So he’s flying in to do that. We’ve got the Tremeloes from the sixties, we’ve got Katrina and The Waves coming from the eighties, you know it’s going to be the best.

If you can imagine the juke box from your mum and dads house; it’s going to be the music that they play right through to the Spice Girls and what we kind of listen to. It’s all onstage for like £5 a ticket and we worked it out if you saw all of these acts, everyone combined, it would cost you £280, but it’s a fiver. There are still a few tickets left for that, which I can’t understand really because if I wasn’t involved in it I would go right that’s your Christmas present because they’re never going to see it again. But yes, it’s a fantastic event. Everything is about five, there’s five events, five pounds, five celebrities, everything is about five.

With people like Terry Christian, Chip Hawkes from the Temeloes, Angie Brown and Katrina from Katrina and the Waves coming down to help raise awareness, you’d be silly to miss out.

Femalefirst Taryn Davies

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A bit closer to home the Charity Dreamgirls & Friends are organising our very own X-Factor style talent competition – Yorkshire’s Got Talent – and our celebrity judging panel is similarly as glamorous with radio queen Liz Green and soapstar Scott Wright taking their seats to judge the best of talent from across Yorkshire.

See here a recent article in the Batley & Birstall News – local to the Frontier Club which will play host to the evening of charity fun on the 7th October.

8 acts will be invited to the final at the Frontier Club, where the winner will go on to perform at our annual concert on 8th October at the Halifax Victoria Theatre, nudging shoulders with the stars!

Register your interest, in tickets or to compete, by emailing charlotte@insightwithpassion.co.uk – let the fun commence!

All you need to do is put this poster up in one of your local stores, put it up in your canteen, office or staffroom, post it on your facebook wall or tweet tweet tweet!

Once you’ve spread the word why not join in? We’re inviting members of the public to get involved in our events – do any of these opportunities sound like something you’d like to do?

1) Take to the catwalk as a Charity Dreamgirls model?

2) Perform infront of a panel of celebrity judges?

3) Experience the life of a vintage cinema star?

4) Prove your knowledge at a Great Big Charity Pub Quiz?

5) Win the chance to perform live at our 5 Years of Magic concert?

Just visit the Awareness Week website, or contact Charlotte on charlotte@insightwithpassion.co.uk to understand what you can do to be part of the magic.

And don’t forget! Follow us on twitter @CharityDreamGRL or become a ‘fan’ on facebook.

Thank you so much – make sure to keep in touch and tell us how you’re making a difference.

Now is the time to get involved.

The Charity Dreamgirls are inviting you to a Fashion Show with a difference that will unite the glamorous and the gifted for a night of entertainment, catwalk competitions, mystery guests and much, much more. The highlight of the night will see local, amateur models take to the catwalk to flaunt their talent – if you’re a budding model make sure to contact us now to get involved!

For just £5 a ticket (or £40 for a group of 10) you could be involved in the Charity Dreamgirls 5 year birthday celebrations and help to make a difference in the community – champagne and a good cause? Yes please!

Join the Charity Dreamgirls & Friends on the 4th October from 7:30pm at ‘The Venue’ in Halifax for a night to remember – and don’t forget your cameras because the best ‘papparazi’ on the night will win 2 tickets to our 5 Years of Magic Concert .

Ooooooo…. Doesn’t it sound like fun?

To confirm your place (guest, model, drag queen or otherwise) use the form below or call Jenny on 07825567001 or by emailing jenny@insightwithpassion.co.uk

Let’s prove we have the talent – who needs Britain’s Got Talent? We have enough here!

Are you a singer? Dancer? Entertainer?

All of the above?

That’s right – the Charity Dreamgirls are putting a call out to the talented in Yorkshire & The North to step forward and join us for an evening of celebration.

Take to the stage at Batley Frontier in front of a panel of celebrity judges for the chance to win an exclusive spot to perform in the Charity Dreamgirls 5 Years of Magic Concert. The winner will be knocking shoulders with legendary celebrities and will have a 15 minute set on-stage at the Halifax Victoria Theatre.

Just register with Charlotte on 07889841555 or email charlotte@insightwithpassion.co.uk to perform on 7th October, the winner of the Talent Show will also win 5 tickets for family and friends to watch at the Concert – lovely!

Ask any fitness instructor what the latest keep-fit craze is and they’ll reply with one word . . . . . . .  ZUMBA !

The phenomenon has been growing in the UK over the last 6 months, with participants in gyms all over the country eager to ‘shake their stuff’ to the funky Latin Rhythms.

New NHS reports indicate that 2.5 hours of exercise a week is crucial for a healthy lifestyle, so we’ve decided to combine healthy living with fundraising in our 3 hour Zumbathon!

So come and join us, you can burn calories, socialise and raise money for charity all in one fun event.