Rams fans showed their generosity toward a good cause last Friday evening as they helped us to amass a mountain of Rams-QPR T-shirts, ready for donation to several charities. They did themselves proud with a great response to our Don’t Ditch It - Donate It T-shirt appeal.

Fans donated more than 140 Derby vs. QPR T-shirts - and there are still more at the DW Soccerdome that were being taken in after the RamsTrust team left to get to the Coventry game.

We were hoping for several dozen shirts to enable charity workers to take an initial batch with them to Ethiopia this month - but the response was so good that we have fulfilled that target and also already supplied a further 30 shirts to be taken to Swaziland on another project!

The first 30 T-shirts are destined for Addis Ababa in Ethiopia on Monday 9th November with Janet Taylor, wife of the Rev Paul Taylor, Vicar of Brailsford and adjacent parishes. The shirts will be distributed to children at orphanages run by the St Matthew's Children's Fund.

You can read about their work here: http://www.smcfethiopia.org/

The further tranches of shirts will include donations to projects in Swaziland and Tanzania; these shirts will be carried by individuals from Anglican Churches & Voluntary Service Overseas. The workers take a batch of shirts in their own luggage, thereby avoiding any carriage or storage costs.

We are keeping this appeal open for a further 3 weeks as many people have advised us that they had forgotten to bring their T-shirts to the Coventry match. Some fans told us that they have other garments to donate and these are welcome – there are always good causes to which your unwanted shirts can be donated.

Your Rams-QPR T-shirts can still be dropped off at any time at the DW/JJB Soccerdome (between 9 am and 10 pm). We will be staffing the collection point there again at our ‘Rendezvous’ before Derby’s home game with Reading on Saturday, 28th November.

As well as Rams-QPR shirts, we received a huge donation of girls’ football kits from the Derbyshire FA Girls & Women Centre of Excellence. They brought us 4 complete sets of Under-10s to Under-16s kits, even including coaches' anoraks and goalkeeping gloves! They now use new kits sponsored by Derby County and so were able to donate the kits.

A big THANKYOU to all fans that donated their unwanted shirts! Grateful thanks also to the DW Soccerdome for facilitating the collection. We had great help from BBC Radio Derby & the Derby Evening Telegraph in publicising the appeal and our thanks go to them as well.

The generosity of Rams fans will soon be visible in Africa when children in need are enjoying their new T-shirts. Everyone who donated will have helped the Rams to ‘go global’ with the goodwill from Derby folks, made possible by the charity links that we have been able to forge.

We hope to relay further location reports with photos from the charity workers as their projects develop. Well done and thanks to all who donated and helped the appeal.