A FESTIVE entrepreneur is again looking to raise some some Christmas cash for charities.
Snitterfield resident Kristina Salceanu last year launched Advent of Change – a Christmas countdown calendar which reveals a new charitable donation behind each of the 24 doors.
Both local and national charities benefit from calendar sales including Myton Hospice, Crisis and Great Ormond Street Hospital.
Instead of receiving a chocolate or gift every day, with Advent of Change, people make a £1 or 50p donation to a different charity for each day leading up to Christmas.
And from clearing plastic from oceans, to funding a bed for a homeless person, a description behind each door lets the person know how the donation has helped.
Sales last year raised £100,000 for charity and Kristina is hoping to double that this year for the benefit of 72 charities.
Kristina has secured the backing of celebrity endorsers including Sir Richard Branson and Joanna Lumley and even received an award from former Prime Minister Theresa May.
The 27-year-old said: “We’ve seen a real increase in unique and unusual advent calendars – it seemed you could get one for almost anything, from food and beauty products to toys, socks and even pork scratchings!
“At the time I had just started volunteering for a charity and everyone I mentioned this to was also looking for ways to help and wanting to do more to help others – but didn’t know how, or who to – and in busy modern world there was no ‘easy’ way to do this.
“The product was born from an interest in merging these two ideas – giving people an easy and ‘Instagrammable’ mechanism to give to charity, in a way that was really on-trend and appealed to the current market.
“I quickly realised that a charitable advent calendar didn’t seem to exist in this way, and that the idea was unique. The potential felt so huge in my head that there was no option to not go ahead with it, and so Advent of Change was born.”
The advent calendars are available at adventofchange.com, and in John Lewis and Waitrose stores nationwide, priced
£29.95.
