Mr Douglas Harrington

Who are the RNLI?

We are a charity founded upon and driven by our values of selflessness, courage, dependability, and trustworthiness, with volunteers at our heart. Values shared by generations of supporters like you who have powered our lifesaving work through your kindness and generosity for almost 200 years.

Volunteers make up 95% of our organisation - ordinary people doing extraordinary things - supported by expert staff, all working together to help communities at home and abroad save lives.

What is the RNLI?

With our wealth of experience and expertise, we are proud to be a world-leading modern emergency service, separate from the coastguard and independent from government.

What do the RNLI do?

Every day of every year, people of all backgrounds get into danger in the water. It’s a problem that we’re here to tackle.

Today, with your support, we are working harder than ever to end preventable drowning. In addition to our 24/7 search and rescue lifeboat service, we operate a seasonal lifeguard service. Every year, our volunteer lifeboat crews and lifeguards help and rescue thousands of people and have saved over 143,000 lives since 1824. Countless more lives are saved through our youth education and water safety work.

In an ideal world, no one would suffer the devastating loss of a loved one to drowning. We’d reach everyone with our water safety advice. If anyone got into trouble, they’d know what to do until help arrived. And our lifesavers would always have everything they need to reach them in time and save lives.

With you by our side, we can move closer to this world. And right now, with our income falling during one of the toughest times the world has ever faced, we need your help more than ever.

Warwickshire Search and Rescue is one of 30+ Lowland Rescue teams across the UK. Along with the other Lowland teams, we are part of the UK SAR framework together with other search and rescue organisations such as Mountain Rescue and RNLI. The team is made up of around 80 volunteers, so all donations go to the good cause – no salaries or expenses are paid to members. The team is based at Stoneleigh Park near Kenilworth, and our geographical reach for callouts covers the whole county of Warwickshire, plus the boroughs of Coventry and Solihull, and also the Eastern side of Birmingham.

Our purpose is to search for high risk missing people. In a lowland setting, this is predominantly people living with dementia who have moved outside their normal safety net, and those with severe mental health issues; people with suicidal intentions are our biggest category. We are only tasked by the emergency services – we do not get called out by the general public. Because of this close working relationship with the emergency services, all members are police vetted and highly trained in many areas including search skills, navigation and first aid; we see ourselves as professional in all but pay.

Our default method of search is on foot, but we search regularly in water, either wade-searching or from boats, from the air using our drone capability, and using highly-trained search dog & handler teams. Over the last few years we have been called out 60-80 times per year. In 2023 we received the ultimate recognition for a voluntary charity: we became the first Lowland Rescue team to be awarded the King’s Award for Voluntary Service.

Despite providing an essential service to the community, we receive no regular funding from government or the emergency services, so all funds must be raised by the same team members who already give a great deal of time to training and live callouts. This is a significant extra burden, so fundraising efforts by others are very highly appreciated indeed.