Hundreds Flock To The National Autistic Society’s Spectrum Colour Walk

600 adults and children flocked to Battersea Park on a sunny but breezy Saturday afternoon to take part in the Spectrum Colour Walk, an inclusive 5km walk around the serene tree lined paths of the park. The event was a roaring success with over £60,000 raised for the National Autistic Society.

The Perfect Setting

Battersea Park, one of London’s favourite green spaces was host to the Spectrum Colour Walk. Planted several hundred years ago in 200 acres of trees and grassy areas it was the perfect host for this autism-friendly event.

World Autism Acceptance Month

Autism comes in many forms and the event kicked-off a wider campaign to raise awareness and support of autistic people. According the National Autistic Society, ‘autistic people face discrimination and barriers across all sectors of society…with 8/10 autistic people experiencing mental health problems’.

An Event Designed For All

The event was carefully designed to cater for autistic people with a specific quiet zone set up, no loud music blaring out over the PA system, an array of bright rainbow colours in the event village and on the route. All information was concise and clearly communicated, either in verbal or written briefings.

Event Manager’s Report

For Emma Butler, the Event Manager from Gladiator Events:

‘The Spectrum Colour Walk for the National Autistic Society held in Battersea Park had a lovely calm and welcoming atmosphere. The sun was shining, participants were smiling and the day ran really smoothly with a great team of staff and volunteers. My highlight was seeing all the participants set off for their walk, and then seeing how a little encouragement when starting their second lap gave them the motivation to keep going! ‘

Final Thoughts

A friendly and joyful event, celebrating the best of people! You can find out more on the work of the National Autistic Society by following this link here.

Marvellous Muddy Mayhem Report: An 'Epic' Success For Garden House Hospice

Almost 500 intrepid adults and children took on the Muddy Mayhem, a family-friendly obstacle course race (OCR) raising funds for Garden House Hospice Care. With Spring in the air, the Muddy Mayhem marked the first event for Gladiator Events in 2025 and was a blast!

Woodall Estate Delivers An ‘Epic’ Event

The hosts for the 2025 Muddy Mayhem was the Woodall Estate, a privately owned estate nestled in a pretty part of Hertfordshire. According to Garden House Hospice: ‘today was nothing short of epic! Muddy Mayhem 2025 at Woodhall Estate was a fantastic success, with muddy fun had by all in support of Garden House Hospice Care. Thank you to everyone who took part, donated, and cheered the runners on – you made it unforgettable’

Behind The Scenes

Putting on OCR event is time-consuming and challenging with a lot of care required testing and setting up safe equipment which has been designed in a thoughtful way. The Team starting the process several days out from the live event getting wet and muddy on many occasions.

Event Manager’s Report

For the Event Manager Stuart Rodgers, ‘From the volunteers to the suppliers, everyone was filled with energy and enthusiasm. I had a small but incredibly hard-working team, everything came together seamlessly, making it all the more rewarding. It was truly amazing to witness the involvement of so many families and children, all eager to participate and enjoy the day. The sense of community really shone through and seeing everyone come together to help fundraise made it an epic day’.

Final Thoughts

The event raised funds and awareness for the Garden House Hospice and had excellent feedback from all who took part. Once again showing the power of events for Charites to connect with supporters.

Learn more about the important work of the Garden House Hospice Care.

Photos courtesy of the Garden House Hospice Facebook Page.

We are Stewards of the Land

Ben Fogle: A New Life in the Wild. Season 15, Episode 1: Ullapool. My5.tv

A passing comment made a real impact on me when watching this documentary over the weekend. It’s an inspiring programme, by the way. Jaw-droppingly beautiful scenery of the wild Scottish Highlands, alongside a dive into the lives of the young couple who single-handedly look after their 10,000 acre Estate with their baby son and dogs in tow.

There were some scenes that resonated with me – feeding and changing a baby while out in the Wild is something I am pretty comfortable with! But I can’t claim to be anything like as tough as this couple with what their day-to-day life entailed. They live a simple and almost completely off-grid existence, and don’t have any reliance on modern machinery or technology. This is inspirational, yet back-breakingly hard work!

Anyway, back to that comment.

Ben Fogle asked Iona, ‘Are you guys the Lairds of the land?’

Iona responded, ‘I prefer to think of myself as the Steward, of looking after the land for future generations. It’s not so short-sighted as thinking it’s anything to do with me.’

It makes such perfect sense. It shows an understanding of the responsibility she has to take care of the land, its flora and fauna, in order to keep it thriving for the future. She’s absolutely right. It’s not about us. We are simply passing through. If we all adopted this attitude, what kind of difference could we make?

If we all looked at the land surrounding us – whether a private garden, our local street or local park, and thought of ourselves as Stewards of that land, we could collectively make an enormous impact. It’s about seeing the land not as something we own, or enjoy using, but as something we have a responsibility to protect for the future.

We’re lucky enough to spend time running events on many beautiful private Estates across the UK. We’re always so careful to make minimum impact on the land, and to leave the land exactly as we found it. But this has made me think about what more we can do. How can we make a positive impact on the land we use, rather than simply returning it to its previous state? It’s our responsibility to do this. It’s something we will definitely be turning our efforts to as our events start coming back this year.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas!

Moving Forward with Meaning

This pandemic has challenged me to eke out the positives of any situation. 2020 has forced us to develop tough skin and to be resilient when hit with bombshell after bombshell of challenges and news.

As a ‘glass half full’ kind of person, and being in the incredibly fortunate position of remaining healthy, I have been able to get through the past 10 months without too many major wobbles. That’s not to say it’s been easy. Isolation from family and friends, juggling caring for my two small children with running a business, a serious health crisis for one of my closest family, all 20 of our 2020 events cancelled and just dealing with the bombardment of news from around the globe tested my resilience. But we all have our own challenges during these times and I am very aware that mine are mild compared to many.

With 2020’s events all written off, I was afforded time to reflect. The pandemic put a lot of things in perspective for me. I thought hard about why I started Gladiator Events, what we are trying to achieve and how we can do better. We have a platform, so it’s important to me that we use this platform to achieve, to influence and to make an impact.

During this time I decided to become a mentor with an amazing organisation called Routes, who pair professional women with refugee and asylum-seeking women to create a mentoring partnership. I am reaching the end of a four-month mentoring journey with my mentee. Throughout this experience I have been educated, inspired and challenged. I’ve been inspired to look at ways we as a business can offer our expertise to those in need and we now have clear team targets to work with other organisations and charities to do just this.

Sustainability is another area that all of the Gladiator Events team shares a passionate desire to work towards. We have, for the first time, measured our Carbon Footprint from our 2019 events and we now have a benchmark from which to set our new targets.

We are working towards a goal of becoming B Corp certified in the near future and whilst we still have a lot of work to do to meet this goal, the shared belief of ‘being the change we seek in the world’ is motivating us to stay on track and to push towards making Gladiator Events as socially and environmentally responsible an organisation we can, and in leading the way in showing how business can become a force for good.

Sarah

A Changed Landscape and Silver Linings

About now, in any normal year, we would be right in the thick of it. Our energy would be starting to lag slightly, the skin on our hands and faces would be looking weather-beaten (or glowing, to put a positive spin on it), and we’d most likely be on our 3rd or 4th pair of heavy duty gloves. We should have 7 events under our belts by now. We should be a well-oiled machine, setting up camp at each new Estate and building, inflating, plumbing, pinning, hammering and staking our way through with precision and good humour.

But those hands and faces remain unscathed and smooth. The gloves lay piled in boxes, the timber, tools and inflatables sit mud-free and neatly stacked, gathering dust in our storage unit. We have yet to load a van with a single piece of kit, as lockdown started two days after our very first event was due to take place.

Of course, we are all desperate for things to get back to ‘normal’ so that we can return to what we love. But we are all still working to define what ‘normal’ is now.

As a company that is so committed to helping charities across the UK, we have been keen to explore how we can help in the current COVID-19 crisis. We are delighted to have partnered with Karshare UK to donate two of our Gladiator Events vans to organisations in Brighton. Instead of transporting obstacle kit around the Country, our vans are now delivering thousands of meals and provisions to vulnerable people across Brighton. We are so pleased that they are being put to good use rather than sitting redundant on the roadside.

Sadly, many of our charity partners have decided to cancel their 2020 events completely. In such an uncertain landscape it has seemed more sensible in many cases to cut losses, and limit the damage. We truly hope that we will be able to run a few of our events still in 2020, but the final decision on this may lay out of our hands.

All we can do in the meantime is plan, plan and plan for our return, whenever that may be. The safety of our staff, volunteers, participants and suppliers is always our top priority, and we cannot return until we, and all the relevant authorities, are content that we are not putting anyone at risk by doing so. We have been working hard re-designing every part of our event from start to finish, ensuring that we are adhering to social distancing, keeping our equipment and site clean, and minimising any risk of transmission. We have a plan that we are confident with, and we look forward to fine-tuning it as we all learn more about the virus, and as restrictions begin to ease.

We have seen some wonderful collaboration during this time. The Event Industry has come together across the globe in a way that we have never seen before. No-one is a competitor, we are all working together for the common cause of bringing back events in a post-COVID world, that inspire, energise and provide joy, and that allow our incredible charity partners to continue their essential work.

We know that when the events do return, they will be even more special than before. We will not take for granted any part of the experience. We will be even more committed to our Sustainability goals.

It has been awe-inspiring to see how quickly and effectively the whole world has been able to mobilise and change its behaviour during this pandemic. This gives us the belief that we can come together to make more positive change in the world, to make the world a fairer place, and to start to heal the damage that humans have caused to nature.

We look forward to seeing you all, safely, one day soon.

Sarah

On the Agenda for 2020: Sustainable Events

Thanks to some brilliant high-profile TV shows and well known individuals, we have all become much more aware of our impact on the environment recently.

The Gladiator Events Team is working really hard to make a change to the way we operate as a Business, at our events and as consultants to our charity partners, to make sure that our events have a minimal impact on the environment.

We have already put in place a lot of changes over the past two years, including eliminating plastic bottles at almost all of our events and recycling as much of our waste as possible (currently 90% of our event waste is recycled).

However there is so much more that we can do. It can be tricky to know where to start, and this is why we’ve decided to put together a 5 year pledge, aiming to drastically reduce our carbon footprint by 2025.

We want to become industry leaders in delivering environmentally conscious events, and we are working really hard to measure, plan and implement our pledge.

We have just launched our Sustainability page on our site, as well as our Environmental Policy.

Here are some of our ideas that we will be working on over the next few months:

• Measuring our Company’s annual carbon footprint for 2019, so we can set ourselves targets for 2020 and beyond

• Having conversations with all our suppliers about their environmental credentials, and working with those that share our values.

• Using local suppliers with short journey times

• Banning single use plastic from all our caterers at 2020 events

• Staff car-sharing and encouraging participant and volunteer car-sharing

• Going digital - all our information documents for the event are now only available digitally

What are you doing in your organisation to work in a more sustainable way? We’d love to hear from you.

2019 HIGHLIGHTS!

Wow! What an amazing season for Gladiator Events.

We wanted to take this time to thank every single one of you for your continuous support throughout the year. We appreciate those who have spent long hours building, running and breaking down our events, supplying our events, participating at the events and those who want to make the events happen. You have all been incredible and without you we wouldn’t have been able to have such a successful year.

In early 2019 we welcomed a new addition to the team, Georgee. Fresh out of University, Georgee came with a bounce of enthusiasm and a love of dogs. In October we also welcomed our newest member of the team, Senior Event Manager Fliss.

After 15 events this year, it is safe to say we are becoming bigger and better every year and with the 20 events next season we are excited to get stuck in once again making it enjoyable to all of you who have shown your support.

In February, we will be gathering all of our staff for training days to make sure the 2020 season is as successful as 2019. We are very much looking forward to kick-starting the 2020 season starting on March 21st for Extreme Warrior on behalf of Katherine House Hospice.

If you fancy a challenge; large or small, team or solo, obstacles or treks, dogs or no dogs, go and check out the event calendar for the season. We promise to not disappoint.

Thank you again, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year — Love, The Gladiator Events Team x