As previously communicated, our developers have been carrying out work to resolve some issues on our website. These issues were concerned with how local events and services were pulled from the Portal onto groups' pages on the main website, which is done by an automatic update that runs every evening.

The issues with the automatic update have now been resolved and the ‘support near you’ section is working as expected. The fixes mean:

• When a local group is removed, its associated events no longer appear on the website.

The Finance Team are working hard to process outstanding payments to our groups. These will be made later this month.

Annual payment to groups in lieu of previous membership subscriptions

We used to ask people to pay to become members of the MS Society. But we don’t want money to be a barrier for anyone who wants to join our community.

If people want to support our work, we now encourage them to make a donation or they can subscribe to MS Matters to find out more about our work.

This year, the theme for Mental Health Awareness Week is ‘nature’.

The Mental Health Foundation recently carried out some research into the impact of the pandemic on mental health. Results showed ‘going for walks outside was one of our top coping strategies and 45% of us reported being in green spaces had been vital for our mental health’.

You can read more about why nature is this year’s theme on the Mental Health Foundation website here.

The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for MS is a cross-political party group interested in MS. We organise this group and will be holding a series of online sessions this year, exploring the experiences of employment for people with MS.

We want to increase the awareness and understanding of MS. And we want to influence MPs to consider disabled people, and people with MS, in their decisions, questions and work when it comes to employment, and addressing the unemployment caused by the pandemic.

Updated February 2022

Registered office address:

As a company, we’re required to have a registered office address recorded with Companies House for receiving official mail, such as from HMRC.

It’s the address we need to use when entering into agreements or submitting formal documents, such as fundraising bids. And it will appear on our letterhead, and on other formal documents such as invoices and purchase orders. The registered office address is the same for each of the nations, even though we have different office locations.

We know talking about MS can be hard, so we asked over 800 people living with MS what they believed were the barriers to speaking out.

Over the past year, many of us will have been invited to social events online. Festivities have been arranged, but food and drink has had to be ‘Bring Your Own’.

Due to increased demand, current supporter group Mary’s Snowflake Creations are looking for volunteer knitters and crocheters to join the team. Catherine and Winnie create beautiful knitted and crocheted items for us, and have raised over £7,000 since 2014.

Catherine said: “After many years of unexplained and ‘strange’ ill-health, I was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis in 2012, after a particularly severe brain stem attack left me quite poorly with significant disabilities.

It’s estimated that there are around 130,000 people in the UK living with MS, plus a further million people with a close connection to MS. By comparison, our total MS Society community of supporters (volunteers, campaigners, fundraisers, advisers, donors, etc) is around 180,000.