Fuel is taking part in the Big Give Christmas Challenge 2025
Posted on: 5th December 2025
Fuel’s Big Give Christmas Challenge is live!
‘Tis the season to be generous! We are excited to share that Fuel’s Big Give Christmas Challenge 2025 has gone live – for one week only, every donation made to Fuel will be matched, meaning your generosity will go twice as far.
This year, all donations will help us fund initiatives that help make our work accessible, delivered by our excellent Engagement team. This includes Take Your Seat (TYS), our commitment to offering 10% of tickets for free across our productions to those that face financial and other socio-economic barriers to the arts, our collaboration with Local Engagement Specialists, and delivery of workshops and talks for schools.
The campaign ends at midday on the 9th December. Help us by spreading the word, sharing our campaign message, or by donating today.
Click here to watch Artistic Director & CEO Kate McGrath share her excitement for our 2025 campaign.
Here is an example of the work we delivered last year.
There’s a Bear on My Chair
‘There’s a Bear on My Chair’ was the first ever stage adaptation of Ross Collins’ much-loved books. Aimed at children aged 2-7 and their grownups, the show was directed by Toby Olié, featuring loveable Bear and Mouse puppets and four Party Mice puppets, designed by Toby and co-designed by Charlie Tymms.
As part of the run at the Southbank Centre in February 2025, we worked with a brilliant Local Engagement Specialist to allocate 317 free TYS tickets to schools with a high percentage of Pupil Premium benefits recipients, and 649 free TYS tickets to families in the local area. Some of the families we reached were part of Groundwork, Unity Matters, Southwark Hearing Support Service, Pecan and Southwark Foodbank, and Parent Action. In Bath, we allocated 60 TYS tickets to Widcombe Infant School.
The nurseries and primary schools that saw the show through TYS tickets were also offered post-show movement and puppetry-based workshops with our wonderful facilitator, Carolene Yawa Ada. We held 9 workshops across 8 Lambeth schools in London and 2 workshops in Bath, for a total of 261 participants between the ages of 2-5 years.
All workshops, along with a creative learning pack for teachers, were designed by Susie Ferguson, a creative learning specialist and trained teacher. Through the exercises in the pack, children learned important lessons about sharing, compromise, problem solving, and empathy. Aligned with the stories of Mouse and Bear in the show, who experience difficulties in sharing the same space and eventually find ways to adapt to each other’s needs and likes, the creative exercises also offered opportunities to explore wider curriculum issues, such as habitat, human rights, migration and world geography.
Teachers were enthusiastic about the workshops, especially as some students were already familiar with the book. They saw the sessions as a valuable extension of the performance, reinforcing key themes. Children particularly enjoyed interactive elements such as Grandma’s Footsteps, role-play through musical statues, listening and responding to music, and mask-making.
Teachers also praised the performance for clearly illustrating concepts of fairness and kindness, aligning well with Early Years Framework areas – particularly Personal, Social and Emotional Development, Communication and Language, and Expressive Arts and Design.
“The workshop was well received and Carolene who facilitated it was lovely. The children enjoyed making the masks and this has continued into the wider classroom and fed into our World Book Week theme of bears. The staff have also been sharing one of the games that was introduced in the outside playground. Thank you again for working so hard to accommodate the needs of our children. The theatre trip and workshop have provided them with invaluable experiences that I am sure will have lasting memories”.
Learn more about our engagement work here.