Charity founder is ‘incredibly grateful’ after ‘whole insurance community really came through for us’ in fundraising effort
Last year’s Insurance Times Awards, held on 4 December 2024 at Grosvenor House in London, raised more than £20,000 for its chosen charity - Charlie’s Promise, an anti-knife crime organisation founded by the father of a 17-year-old boy who was stabbed to death at a house party in July 2023.
During the awards event, which was hosted by TV presenter Claudia Winkleman, the founder of Charlie’s Promise, Martin Cosser, addressed around 1,000 attendees from across the general insurance sector, explaining the story of how his son Charlie had been killed and the purpose of the resultant Charlie’s Promise charity.
His heartfelt and passionate speech inspired a raft of donations from the evening’s guests, while funds were also raised through a silent auction.
Cosser - who established an insurance broker the month before Charlie died, subsequently giving up the business after his son passed away - told Insurance Times that Charlie’s Promise only registered as a charity in April 2024.
This meant he was “really grateful” that “the whole insurance community really came through for us” to make the Insurance Times Awards the charity’s “biggest individual fundraiser we’ve had” to date.
Cosser noted that he was blown away by the “compassion” and “empathy” that he was shown by both the event’s organisers and guests.
He said: “I thought the whole night was so, so well run and we were treated with nothing but respect and dignity. And we are really grateful for that, so a massive thank you for [everybody’s] time and kindness.
“I can’t tell you how grateful we are, we are incredibly grateful. That money is going to be reinvested into the charity in a really positive way.”
Purposeful projects
Education on knife crime and its impact on families for both children and their parents is the linchpin of what Charlie’s Promise aims to deliver, Cosser explained.
With this in mind, he has big plans for the funds raised at the Insurance Times Awards.
This includes the creation of a new youth hub, most likely situated in Guildford, near Cosser’s home in Milford.
The hub will feature a multiroom exhibition, with each room depicting a different nuance of knife crime, such as the effect on the victim’s family and showcasing what it is like to go to prison and face the consequences of committing knife crime.
Cosser aims to involve both professional actors and art students in this “big project”.
The youth hub will also be home to further initiatives Cosser wishes to launch, such as one-to-one mentoring delivered as an intervention tool in collaboration with local police forces, access to “qualified youth workers” and the creation of a regular “men’s peer-to-peer support group”.
This last scheme is particularly important for Cosser, as he believes that only other families that have had children murdered can really, truly relate to and understand each other. Therefore, establishing a support network that can help mitigate this “very lonely place” is of paramount importance.
“The money [that has been] raised will go a long way towards helping us realise some of our ambitions and aspirations,” Cosser added.
‘Broken’ family
The new projects that Cosser wants to get underway will work alongside his existing schedule of speaking at schools and addressing parents.
He is “campaigning as hard as I can” to have knife crime included in personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) lessons, for example, because he feels that the current school curriculum in this field is “100 years out of date” and “archaic”.
He continued: “The power of education is so, so, so important. But education starts at home with the parents.
“I cannot tell you what [knife crime] does to a family. My wife still sleeps with the light on. We leave the back door open because we used to leave it open for Charlie. She messages him every day telling him she loves him.
“My daughter can’t even go to sixth form because she’s so broken. No one wants to be us. There is nothing worse than being a family like ours.
“Things do need to change and I’m not going to stop until they do.”
Find out more about Charlie’s Promise here and which firms won at the Insurance Times Awards 2024 here.
During her tenure so far, she has taken home prizes such as Best Trade Award and Publication of the Year from Biba’s annual Journalist and Media Awards, been annually shortlisted in the General Insurance Journalist of the Year (B2B) category at Headlinemoney’s yearly awards event, as well as received numerous highly commended prizes in the Insurance and Risk Features Journalist of the Year category at WTW’s annual Media Awards.View full Profile
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