DECEMBER 2025
We are sadly announcing that after 15 years of supporting low income students at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka in Sam’s memory, next year will see our final fundraising event. So far we have raised a total of £76,800 to help students on their way to successful careers working for agencies like Magnum, and publications around the world such as Le Monde, the Guardian, National Geographic and Time magazine. Many have won prestigious awards or been selected as Ones to Watch by the British Journal of Photography. Please see more information on our Bursary Students page. We have enjoyed contact with many of the 45 bursary students and received some touching messages of how the fund has changed their lives.
Hopefully the end of next year will see a final tally of £82,300 so that we can send off the last annual contribution of £5,500 to our final cohort of students.
As many of you may know our family circumstances changed dramatically last year after Graham suffered a major stroke in early June. This had an immediate impact on our fundraising ambitions and activities. Pathshala staff responded to our news by insisting that we prioritise Graham’s health.
We would like to thank you all for your amazing support over the years.
We like to think that Sam has been with us along the way in supporting the incredible Pathshala Institute and the selected bursary students and that his spirit will live on in their work.
Our final fund raising event 2026 –
SAVE THE DATE – 8th AUGUST!
Live music, BBQ and Bar
Venue:
Quiet Waters, Atherington, Umberleigh, North Devon, EX37 9HZ
Pathshala photography display
NOVEMBER 2024
I am writing this having just sent off our 2024 contribution to Pathshala South Asian Media Institute to provide financial assistance to those students who have applied for and been granted a Sam Banks bursary for 2025.
As many of you may know our family circumstances changed dramatically this year after Graham suffered a major stroke in early June. This had an immediate impact on our fundraising ambitions and activities. Pathshala staff responded to our news by insisting that we prioritise Graham’s health and forgo our fundraring plans for the year. Despite this we have managed to send them £3,500, just over 63% of our annual commitment.
We are enormously touched by villagers who, in the light of our difficult family circumstances, have decided to organise a village folk concert in aid of the fund. The event will be on 18th January 2025 (details at the end). This gesture is also to honour Graham’s contribution to the musical life of Lympstone and aknowledge the great challenges he faces in returning to playing an instrument.
Much of the £3,500 sent was raised by Kate’s half marathon run in September. Although times intended for practice runs were limited by care for Graham or her young son Afra, she managed to complete the course in Richmond Park raising £1,145 in sponsorships. Over the year the village busking group (now named Two Metres Plus as a result of the band gathering members from its original two), raised £530.84. Other contributions came in from ongoing sales of Graham’s book Soundings, generous donors and the essential monthly donations from friends who give by direct debit.
We hope to see many of you at the Good Company Folk concert on January 18th!
See details here..
With Good Company
An evening of folk songs and tunes
… brought to you by regulars from Lympstone Folk Club and a fine collection of musical friends
Tickets from Susannah’s Tea Room or online at http://www.lympstone-entertainments.net
The concert will be on Saturday 18th January 2025 starting at 7.30 pm at the Village Hall in Lympstone. Doors and bar open at 6.45pm for a 7.30pm start.
The event is a fundraiser for the Sam Banks Memorial Fund, which was started by the Banks family in memory of their son Sam. The fund supports young students of photojournalism to attend the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka, Bangladesh. More details of the charity and its work can be found here:
https://sambanksmemorialfund.org/
There will be a display giving more information about the work of the institute in the community room, and the opportunity to learn more from Professor Liz Wells, who has visited and taught at Pathshala.
Performers on the night will be regulars from the Lympstone Folk Club and other musical friends from the local area.
A Lympstone Entertainments production
DECEMBER 2023
Fund Raising in 2023
Once again we would like to thank you for past and present support for the Sam Banks Memorial Fund.
Early in November we paid £5,500 to Pathshala, making the total from the Sam Banks Memorial Fund now £67,800. £802 of that came from the activities of Two Metres Plus, the folk group started in lockdown by Graham (flute) and John Welton (concertina) as Two Metres. It now regularly includes Sue Harmes (mandolin and guitar) and Warwick Downes (double bass and violin). Most Saturday mornings they can be heard outside the Swan Inn in Lympstone and they play carols near the harbour in December. This year they also played at John’s 80th birthday concert with a collection plate at the door, which boosted their fund raising by another £346.
Jan and Rupert Grey raised £520 by showing their film Romantic Road in South Harting. That was the second showing of the film in aid of the fund and we are thankful for their continuing support.
Graham produced a book of essays, reminiscences and travel journals called Soundings which has so far raised £470 for the fund and we hope will go on selling next year. If you would like a copy (£10) please contact Graham at gthbanks@gmail.com.
£387 came from regular monthly or quarterly donations. We are very grateful to these donors but we would very much like to see this figure higher. A £5 monthly donation is pretty painless but gives us the reassurance of regular income.
Seaglass Gallery in Lympstone continue to sell Louise’s cards and prints that are specifically in aid of the fund without taking commission and that has raised another £353 this year. Our neighbour, Ian Goult, continues to give us his read copies of the Guardian (usually by 10 am) on the understanding that we put some money into the fund and that has raised £330.
All this is very positive, but it should be plain to see that these numbers don’t add up to anywhere near the £5,500 we have just given. In fact, together with £589 in miscellaneous donations, they come to £3, 453 and, as in 2020, we have had the difficult choice between letting Pathshala down by reducing our annual commitment or providing the missing £2,000 ourselves.
On a positive note, Kate is planning to run a half marathon in 2024 and will be asking for sponsors in the New Year. We are also planning an evening of readings and music in Lympstone and there is still money to be made from Graham’s book, Louise’s prints and cards and Two Metres Plus.
For 2024 we need one or more of the following: fund raising ideas that might bring in thousands rather than hundreds, a lot more small but regular donors, major donors who can afford to give three figure sums (we had one this year). We will gladly receive your ideas – as well as your money!
The Sam Banks Memorial Fund 2020-2022
First of all we would like to thank you for past and present support for the Sam Banks Memorial Fund. We thought we should keep you informed about how the fund has been doing since covid struck. Its immediate impact back in the spring of 2020 was to require the cancellation of the big music event we had planned in Clapham that May. This denied us an important source of fundraising and it was hard to see how we could replace it, since people could not gather together.
Then Louise had the idea of putting musical clips from past memorial events on Facebook and donations started coming in. Meanwhile Graham had been forced to practice music with John Welton out of doors since neither was allowed in the other’s house. The duo was soon joined by Bruce Ellis, Warwick Downes and Alice Henderson and Louise started filming clips of them all playing together and putting those on Facebook too. They also started collecting from neighbours and passers-by. When it came to make the annual payment to Pathshala all this music had raised £1,143 and a further £171 came from playing carols at Christmas.
Our annual commitment to Pathshala is £5,500 and for the first time in ten years we were well short and had to dip into savings to fulfil our pledge. We realised we could not go on doing that and began to worry that we might have to terminate the fund. Our original commitment, made in 2011, had been to guarantee funding up to 2021. Then Louise, who had started regular swimming in the Exe estuary that October, came up with the inspired idea of a sponsored swim. She swam every day in February 2021 – even when the cliff was festooned with icicles – aiming to average a quarter of a mile a day and complete seven miles over the month. (In fact she swam eight and a half.) The response to this astonished us. She raised £5,680 and the future of the fund was, for the time being, secured.
Since then our most significant fundraising has come from a calendar of stunning pictures by Lympstone photographer, Harley Jaffer. Harley, another wild swimmer, came up with the idea of a local, water-themed calendar to sell at £20 and generously paid for the initial print run of 25. Those sold out quickly and we had more printed. Sixty-eight were sold and the fund gained £930.
During 2022 Louise’s cards and prints raised £396 and she auctioned a painting online for a further £350. Jan and Rupert Grey showed their film Romantic Road in Stedham Village Hall, West Sussex and raised £240. As always, we have been supported by regular donors whose loyalty we greatly appreciate. Standing orders raised £406.
We just reached our target thanks to the surplus from the previous year’s sponsored swim so in 2023 we will need to find another big fund-raising idea.
Since the fund started in 2010 we have handed over a total of £62,300 to Pathshala.
Update on the students;
Since Sam’s death in 2010, the fund has helped to support a total of 40 low income students studying photo journalism at Pathshala South Asia Media Institute in Dhaka. We receive regular updates on their progress along with photography project, work from the institute. To give just a few recent examples of achievements (too many to mention here, after 12 years of student support):
Sumi Khatun – (Anjuman)
Shortlisted for 2020 Women Photographers Grant by PHmuseum.
2020 selected as Ones to Watch by the British Journal of Photography, and one of the Top Photgraphy Graduates to Watch at PHmuseum.
Paris Photo digital masterclass 2022 (one of 4 new talents)
Interviewed on Artists Talks Carte Blanche Etudients 2022 by the director of Picto Foundation and Paris Photo , Vincent Marcilhay
2021 She was selected to show in The Makeable Mind, at the Noorderlicht International Photo Festival.
Soumya Sanker Bose – has gone on to be awarded the prestigious Magnum Foundation and Henry Luce Foundation’s Migration and Religion grant along with a run of exhibitions in New York, Texas, Kathmandu , Kolkatar and Nepal.
Homayra Adiba was a recipient of ‘Equity Grant Winner’ Art prize 2021.
Md. Fazla Rabbi was selected as the British Journal of Photography Ones to Watch 2021 and also awarded a Creation Grant at the Anghor Photo Festival.
Arafat Bin Siraji has been selected to show next year at the 8th Lumix Festival of Visual Journalism for young photographers.
Many of our students have documented the plight of marginalised communities in Bangladesh and around the world. Walid Saddam documented the Rohingya refugee crisis, Abhijit Shuvo photographed the forgotten veterans of the Bangladesh War of Independence, Shadman Chowdhury has photographed the indigenous Santal community who are being evicted from their farm land and homes by the Bangladesh government and sugar mill authorities, Istiak Karim was funded by the Australian government to take part in ‘the politics of aid’ project where he documented the impact and effectiveness of aid on a village in Jhor district of Nepal.
Mrittaker Gain focused on Kalabogi village in Khulna district. Through her images she tells the story of the relationship between the people here, especially women, with the changing environment. Jhulantapara, on the banks of Shibsa, is constantly being submerged under extreme tidal conditions.
These are just a few examples of the brave and bold photo-journalism emerging from Pathshala with the support of the Sam Banks Fund.
Photos and posts, along with other fund updates can be found on:
instagram sambanksfund2010
Sam Banks Memorial Fund 