Sheen Group
Since we started 18 years ago, Car 55 has raised a total of $3 million dollars out of a total $25 million.
This year with the help of your donations we raised a staggering $527,000. Each year our goal is to exceed our funds raised from the previous year and with your ongoing support and generosity that’s what we could do, with a $72,000 increase on 2016!
Martin Stone, head of Sheen Panel Service, is also a top fundraiser for Variety – the Children’s Charity annual major event, the Variety Bash.
Stone found out about the iconic event, the brainchild of entrepreneur Dick Smith, by accident.
“I had a phone call from a friend who asked me if I would like to do a Bash,” he says.
“I said: “What’s a Bash?”
Two days later, in Perth, he came across a 1964, EH Holden station wagon.
“Within 20 minutes I had bought it and was organising for it to be shipped back to Melbourne.”
The car had already done eight Bashes and had clicked over more than 150,000 miles.
Under Stone’s stewardship, it made its first outing in a Victorian Variety Bash in 1997 which saw them travelling around Tasmania.
If competing in the Bash wasn’t enough reward, Stone says his devotion to the event and Variety was sealed when a young girl made her way onto the stage at Devonport.
She took the microphone and spoke of how for the best part of 16 years her medical condition had forced her to be bedridden and she had to be turned every two hours.
“She said “with this wheelchair from Variety I am a free as a butterfly”,” Stone says, emotion rising in his voice all these years later. “I was signed up from then on.”
After 18 years on the Bash Martin Stone has travelled over 72kms around Australia and raised a staggering $3 Million Dollars for Variety – the Children’s Charity.