University News Last updated 27 September 2018
Thousands of people from across the country are preparing to take part in the UK’s biggest corporate sleep-out event next week, with Birmingham City University hosting a networking and welcome event for fundraisers before they embark on an overnight sleep-out.
‘Byte Night’ is Action for Children’s annual fundraising sleep-out event and takes place on Friday 5 October in twelve locations across the UK, with businesses helping to raise funds for vulnerable and disadvantaged children.
Simultaneous sleep outs will take place across 12 locations: Birmingham, London, Thames Valley, Cambridge, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Belfast, Newcastle, Cardiff, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Companies including Royal Mail and Vodafone are signed up to sleep out at the Byte Night Birmingham event, which takes place at City Centre Gardens on Cambridge Street.
They’ll be joined by Joanna Birch, Director of Innovation, Enterprise and Employability at Birmingham City University.
“As the university for Birmingham we care passionately about shared prosperity and all too often its apparent that more needs to be done to address disparities”, said Joanna.
“Since signing up I’m on my third bake sale. The team effort to support my fundraising efforts has been so inspiring.”
Over 123,000 children in the UK are homeless, with family breakdowns and abuse in the home being some of the causes.
“Every child should have a safe and loving home, but sadly too many are in desperate situations and need our help”, said John Egan, Director of Children’s Services at Action for Children.
“As early help funding from central government continues to diminish, events like Byte Night are even more vital to help our frontline services to ensure young people don’t slip through the net and end up with nowhere to go.”
Find out more about Byte Night and signing up to take part at www.bytenight.org.uk.