22/09/2026
A gift from Scotland, and a thank you - we won't forget.
Every so often something lands that stops you in your tracks. This one arrived in an envelope.
We have received a donation of £1,305.70 from Fibromyalgia Friends Scotland, a charity based in Ayr that has spent years doing the same work we do, supporting people living with fibromyalgia. The charity is now closing, and rather than let the last of their funds sit unused, their trustees went looking for someone who would carry on the work. They chose us.
The money had originally been ring fenced to repay a grant awarded some years ago. Despite their best efforts, the trustees could not trace the original grant giver to return it. They asked the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator for advice, suggested the funds come to Fibromyalgia Friends Together because our remit sits so closely alongside theirs, and the OSCR agreed.
We want to be honest about how that felt. Closing a charity is not a small thing. There will be people in Ayrshire and beyond who found their footing because of Fibromyalgia Friends Scotland, who picked up the phone on a bad day and found somebody at the other end who understood. To spend your final act as trustees making sure that support continues somewhere else says everything about why those people started the charity in the first place.
What we are going to do with it
We were asked, quite reasonably, what we intend to spend it on. Our trustees have agreed that it goes to our frontline support work, the part of what we do that reaches people most directly.
That means keeping our helpline and enquiry service running, so that somebody newly diagnosed, or somebody who has been living with this for twenty years and has hit a wall, has a real person to talk to. It means refreshing our information and resources, because too much of what people find online is either frightening or useless. And it means backing our volunteer led peer support, so that nobody has to work out how to live with fibromyalgia entirely on their own.
We are a small charity run by volunteers, most of us living with fibromyalgia ourselves or caring for someone who does. A donation of this size does not disappear into overheads here. It moves things along.
Thank you
To Anne McDonald, John Russell and Maureen McGinty, and to everyone who gave their time to Fibromyalgia Friends Scotland over the years: thank you. We are grateful, and humbled, to have been the ones you chose. We will look after it.
If you would like to talk to someone, or find out more about our support, you can reach us on 0116 298 8007 or at [email protected].
Mark Farmer, Chair, and Sandra Webster, Treasurer, Fibromyalgia Friends Together
