A Small Charity Doing Big Things:

Pete the Street and Glasgow Care Foundation

Earlier this year, the fire on Union Street left a scar on the city centre that anyone who knows Glasgow felt. Out of that hard moment came an unexpectedly generous act, and we were lucky enough to play a small part in sharing it.

TL;DR

• • Artist Pete Brown, known as Pete the Street, painted the aftermath of the Union Street fire and donated every penny from a limited print run, £12,017.40, to charity.
  • He chose Glasgow Care Foundation, a charity that has supported the city’s most vulnerable people for more than 150 years.
  • We produced the film free of charge, as a Glasgow studio giving something back to its own city.
  • You can support Glasgow Care Foundation directly, whatever you are able to give. Donate here

An artist who chose Glasgow, and a charity in its bedrock

Peter Brown, known to many as Pete the Street, has been painting Glasgow for years. He is not from here, but he returns to the city again and again, drawn to its streets, its weather, its people and its buildings. When the Union Street fire happened, Pete did what he does: he set up his easel and painted the scene as he found it.

What he did next is the part worth telling. Rather than keep the proceeds, Pete decided the work should give something back to the city that had inspired it. He ran a limited print run of the paintings and donated every penny to charity, a total of £12,017.40.

When he went looking for where that money should go, he wanted somewhere local. Somewhere woven into the fabric of Glasgow itself. He chose Glasgow Care Foundation, and it is hard to imagine a better fit.

150 years of quiet, practical help

Glasgow Care Foundation has been part of this city for more than 150 years. It was established in 1874, as the Glasgow Charity Organisation Society, decades before the NHS or the welfare state existed, with a single aim: to relieve poverty in Glasgow.

Across that century and a half, the organisation has adapted to whatever the city needed. It opened Glasgow’s first homeless shelter in 1904. It founded Scotland’s first Citizens Advice Bureau during the Second World War. It helped bring in the regulations that still govern charitable collections in this country today. It became The City of Glasgow Society of Social Service in 1928, and took the name Glasgow Care Foundation in 2013.

Through wars, recessions and a pandemic, the work has continued, usually without fanfare. That is rather the point. The Foundation describes itself as “a small charity doing big things for Glasgow”, and it means both halves of that. Eight volunteer trustees and a tiny staff keep costs down so that funds go where they are needed. The motto, “a helping hand, not a handout”, has barely changed in a century.

Today the need is sharply real. In Glasgow, around three in ten children live in poverty, and more than four in ten people live in the most deprived fifth of areas in Scotland. The Foundation provides the practical things that get a household through a crisis: beds, flooring, white goods, the essentials that turn a house back into a home. It also funds community projects and school initiatives that ease isolation and build resilience. Its ambition is to positively improve 100,000 lives over the next ten years.

This is the charity Pete chose. Local people helping local people, in the most literal sense.

Why we made this film for nothing

When Glasgow Care Foundation came to us, it was through a familiar face. One of their board had worked with our team before and got in touch to talk about producing a piece of content that could share Pete’s story and the donation the charity had received.

It did not take us long to land on the answer. We are a Glasgow studio. This is a Glasgow charity doing essential work in our own city, stretched by rising demand and reliant on the generosity of others to keep going. The chance to put our craft to use for them, at no charge, was not a hard decision. It was a small way for us to give back to the community we are part of.

So we produced this film as our own contribution. No fee, just our time, our kit and our team, offered in the same spirit that prompted Pete to give in the first place.

We filmed Pete back in Glasgow, working in the streets that draw him north. The result is a short, honest piece about why he gave, and why he chose to give close to home.

You can help too

That is really the heart of all this. One person used what they had, a talent and a following, to support a charity that has been quietly holding up the most vulnerable people in Glasgow for 150 years. We were glad to help tell that story.

You do not need to be an artist, or to run a studio, to do the same. Whatever you can give, in time, money or fundraising, goes directly to families across Glasgow who have run out of other options.

If Pete’s story has moved you, you can support Glasgow Care Foundation here:

www.donate.justgiving.com/charity/glasgowcarefoundation/

A small charity doing big things for Glasgow. Worth helping.