Aquabox Ambassadors Sylvia and Ray Spare have been working tirelessly over the last 4 years to make the Aquabox Challenge a tremendous success.
Sylvia and Ray became involved with youth groups and Aquabox in February 2022. As members of Ashby Castle Rotary club Sylvia visited the Aquabox depot in Wirksworth and returned home with an Aquabox and lots of ideas of taking this to youth groups. After attending a camp of 5000 guides in Hampshire with an Aquabox demonstration kit with the idea of developing an Aquabox challenge. This was launched in February 2023. Later in 2025 the challenge was extended to three Aquabox challenges AquaBlue, AquaSilver and AquaGold which are adaptable for all ages. The challenges are all water based and help promote an understanding of how important clean, safe drink water is.
Since then, Sylvia and Ray have visited over 320 organisations, made up of Guiding Scouting, Trefoil Guilds, Rotary Clubs, WI and Churches and schools. A very impressive 17,556 young people now have an idea about the work carried out by AQUABOX and ROTARY. Slowly the challenge has been spreading worldwide through the guiding and scouting movements and groups are participating in Australia, Canada, USA and parts of Europe and the Caribbean to name a few.
If all this was not enough early this month, they celebrated achieving £20,000 fundraising and today it is £20,469.58. Ray said to someone recently – “how many other Rotarians can say they have reached 20,000 young people and adults and told them all about Aquabox and what Rotary does! Some people say how do you keep up the energy – but we have a lot of fun”.
One recent group, 1st Cromford Brownies, who actually meet in Wirksworth and are the closest unit to the Aquabox depot completed their Silver Challenge (including a Depot visit).
Sylvia was delighted to receive an unexpected message from their leader and learn that yesterday; they held a fund-raising event at their unit meeting and raised £75 for Aquabox. Attached is copy of the AquaSilver badge gained by the Cromford Brownies.
