Conscious Ball raises over £5,400 for SANE
On November 17th last year, the second edition of Conscious Ball was held at Gosford House. The ball, first held at Oxford and Cambridge in 2017 after the venture was founded by Kam Sohi, was organised by and for students at Edinburgh University to raise money and awareness for mental health causes. For the second year in a row, SANE was chosen as one of the beneficiaries, receiving an incredible donation of £5,432.70!
This year the President of the volunteer team was Anusan, who told us why Conscious Ball had picked mental health as its focus and chosen SANE as one of their main charities:
“Conscious was started with two main objectives in mind. Firstly, to raise a significant amount of money for various charities supporting the large multitude of aspects surrounding mental health issues.
“Secondly, and arguably more importantly for us, to help eradicate the stigma and taboo surrounding mental illness, especially amongst students and young people. We aimed to do this by bringing mental health to the forefront of university life, starting conversations and running events to normalise the act of speaking about mental health.
“This will not be an easy or quick task but we feel as though we have made great strides this year and hope to continue this in the future. As mentioned at the event itself, we really wanted to cover all aspects of mental health, especially those which people are not exposed to as much in popular media and perhaps those which people are less knowledgeable about.
“We chose SANE as we believe their 3 main objectives align perfectly with our own and we were delighted to have been able to have a Black Dog statue (Watt-Woof, generously donated by Heriot-Watt University) at our event. This was definitely a conversation starter at the ball itself and helped us towards achieving our goals.
“All of us at Conscious have incredible respect and admiration for the wonderful work that SANE do and we hope our contribution will help continue this invaluable work.”
From everyone here at SANE we’d like to thank the Conscious Ball team for their generous donation, and all of the fantastic work they are doing to destigmatise mental health at universities.
Find out more about the SANE Black Dog Campaign.
