More Than A Hospice

Grief campaigns usually ask the viewer to look at the loss. CHAS's "More Than A Hospice" asks them to look at the fingerprint instead. A mother describes the first time she counted her daughter's ten tiny fingers and toes; on screen, a single fingerprint appears on paper and slowly draws itself into Zoe, an animated character illustrated by Marion Deuchars and built from actual fingerprints collected from children at a CHAS workshop at Rachel House. Every line on screen belongs to a real child in CHAS's care. As the mother recounts learning Zoe would die, the palette darkens; it lifts again as she talks about the hospice becoming the light — the pool she swam in for the first time, the rooms where she laughed. Zoe walks into the woods with balloons and lets them go. The film anchors Scotland's largest children's hospice appeal in thirty years: £20 million over three years to modernise Rachel House and Robin House and shift care from buildings alone to a seamless hospital-hospice-home model. The strategic move worth stealing: when your fundraising asks for structural change, don't argue the system — let a single physical trace of a real life do the persuading.