This week sees voting go live in the Cash for Charities competition in association with the Packet - and the finalists can be revealed.

Last month we asked readers to nominate their favourite charities, after our parent company’s charitable arm, The Gannett Foundation, announced it was providing £125,000 in cash to support local charities across the country.

The Packet region has a £20,000 share to give away, and now one charity from each newspaper has been put forward to win. 

We’re now putting the power to allocate the cash back into the hands of our readers, as for the next four weeks readers will be invited to collect tokens from our newspapers, which can then be sent to collection points across our region or posted.

Each token collected will then be used to allocate cash to the nominated charity – so if your favourite charity collects 50% of all to tokens collected, it will receive 50% of the £20,000!

Having been nominated by Packet readers, the Cornwall Accessible Activities Programme (CAAP) is one of eight charities in the region that is in running for the funds. 

Now the charity has spoken to The Packet about what it would mean to win a large porition of the grant. 

Sandy Lawrence, who works with the charity organising special activities and days out for youngsters involved with the programme told the Packet: "We're a charity that supports families across the whole of Cornwall who have a child with an additional need or a disability.

"The primary objective is to provide activities for the children and young people during the school holidays, so that they've got something to go back and brag about to their peers and also to get them away from their screens.

"Last week was half term and we've been alpaca trekking, we've done archery and axe throwing, going to a geothermal pool and also playing pirate golf.

"So we try to give our kids these activities that perhaps their parents might be a little hesitant about them doing and, because of the cost, we subsidise all of our activities for all of our kids so that they get to do them.

"The more children do it the more they'll interact with things.

Read Next:

"We've got 800 plus member families across the county and we support families with children who are zero to 25.

"We run on an absolute shoestring and all of the money goes into providing these activities for the children.

"Over the last summer holidays we've had somewhere around 300 to 400 children join us for our activities such as pasty making."

One of the organisations that the charity has close links with is use Wetwheels South West based in Falmouth.

It offer accessible powerboating experiences so that people with any disability can get out on, and enjoy, the water.

"Over the summer we went out with Wetwheels three times, they're always very, very popular those days.

"In fact we could have filled our Wetwheels days twice over as there's only so many spaces we can have," said Sandy. 

"When we go out as group we're all supporting each other, and our members know there's always someone whose got their back.

"Every day of every holiday costs near £1,000 and being able to put on these activities, well, it's difficult to put into words, just to be able to continue doing that.

"Every little bit of funding that we can get really really helps."

Voting kicks off in this Wednesday's editions of the Packets, with tokens in every week during November. There is no limit to the number of papers that can be bought for tokens each week. 

Details on voting, including a list of locations where there are voting boxes, can be found in paper. 

The Cornwall Accessible Activities Programme is up against Communicare in Southampton tackling loneliness, Winchester Go LD providing music for adults with learning disabilities, Bridge Youth Project in Salisbury, The Safe youth project in Basingstoke, South Wight Area Youth on the Isle of Wight, Will Mackaness Trust in Weymouth and Amelia's Rainbow supporting children in Dorset with terminal and life-limiting illnesses.