Tom Gattos, Co Founder The Rainbow Lottery:
It’s incredible how many lives you can squeeze into one life. Being Co-Founder of The Rainbow Lottery is a new life for me. And it’s a life that I’m loving. After all, what could be better than helping people – especially when those people are part of your own community.
My partner and I began setting up the nation’s first and only lottery exclusively supporting LGBTQ+ good causes two years ago. We had wanted to play an LGBTQ+ lottery during lockdown and we couldn’t find one. So we decided to create one ourselves with the pension money we’d saved. It’s been worth it. So far. The Rainbow Lottery has raised around £85k each year for over 100 LGBTQ+ good causes, which we represent.
Although we have advertised in Attitude and DIVA magazines and on GAYDIO, we’re a not-for-profit, so we don’t actually have a great deal of money to spend on national advertising campaigns. Consequently, yours truly has been seeing a lot of the country, spreading the good word with leaflets and beer mats in pubs and community centres in London, Brighton, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester – no easy task during train strikes last year! I haven’t been to Nottingham yet, but it’s on my list for this year, as is Bristol, Cardiff and Glasgow.
We were shortlisted for The British LGBT Awards and The Rainbow Honours in our first year, so it seems we’re doing something right. But we’ve still got a long way to go if you consider we currently only sell about 10,000 tickets a month. There are, after all, supposed to be up to 6,000,000 in the LGBTQ+ community in Britain. Imagine all the good we could do if everyone just bought a £1 ticket! So as long as I have the strength to get on board a train, I’ll be waving the Rainbow Lottery flag and promoting all our good causes, including of course, Notts LGBT+ Network, and making the most of this new life I have. Raising money for all our community’s vital causes and giving as much as £25,000 in prizes to players each week! Well, someone’s got to do it!
So c’mon, everybody wins on the Rainbow Lottery. Buy your ticket today!
https://www.rainbowlottery.co.uk/support/notts-lgbt-network
