Family and friends of popular Peterborough man who passed away to scale Mount Snowdon in his honour and support mental health charities

Next Saturday (September 18), Matthew McSwiggan will lead an expedition of nine of his brother Kevin’s friends to reach the peak on Mount Snowdon, in the Snowdonia National Park in north Wales.

He will be joined by Ricky Benson, Michael Bradshaw, Dev Patel, Jonny Burns, Luke Madden, Ally Wright, Liam Handlonocous, George Hill and Ash Liddie.

The climb is taking place in memory of Kevin (40), who lost his battle with his “brain demons” in December last year. Kevin was born and lived in Peterborough his whole life and had a large network of friends.

Matthew has described his brother as a “beautiful human” who was always there for everyone.”

Over the past year, the group has raised over £6000 for both Edward’s Trust and Kaleidoscope Group.

They have done this by a series of events such as hosting street bingo during lockdown as well as raising over £2000 at Kevin’s wake, which has attended by over 300 people at the Fletton Ex-Service and Working Mens Club.

Now though, the group have chosen to push themselves to take on a much bigger challenge and have had a banner produced, to unfurl at the top of Snowdon and t-shirts made with the slogan behind all of the fundraising efforts “It’s ok not to be ok.”

The charities specialise in helping people through bereavement and loss and with mental health and wellbeing respectively and have been an invaluable help to Matthew over the past year.

Matthew said: “These two personal charities have personally helped me and given me a lot of support.

“Struggles with mental health are rife at the moment and have been even more so over the last 18 months and these are independent charities that do so much to help and have so much demand. They also need help to make sure they can carry on helping as many people as possible as they don’t get anything from the government.

“Of course, mental health is something that is dear to my heart and we want to continue to get our message out there that it is ok not to be ok.

“A group of Kevin’s friends came together and said they wanted to do take on a challenge as a way to get fit and support the cause, so we decided that for our first one we could climb Snowdon and we are really looking forward to it.”

To support the fundraising efforts in the name of Kevin McSwiggan. visit www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/rip-kevin-mcswiggan?utm_term=RBryYKY9P.

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