Lifeboat Saturday - we need you!

Join us for Lifeboat Saturday throughout October, when our communities will proudly come together to run street collections to raise money for the RNLI. Inspired by the first street collection in aid of the RNLI in 1891, Lifeboat Saturday is a new annual event with kindness and community at its heart.

The first ever Lifeboat Saturday in 1891 changed the face of fundraising forever. It happened in response to the worst disaster in RNLI history when, on 10 December 1886, 27 lifeboatmen from Southport and St Anne's lifeboat stations lost their lives while attempting to rescue the crew from the German barque Mexico.

This inspired Lifeboat Saturday, the world’s first recorded charity street collection. More than 30,000 people lined the streets of Manchester to watch bands and floats parade through the city, while volunteers collected kind donations in tins and buckets. They raised over £5,000 (that’s over £500,000 today) – a remarkable sum. In the following years, Lifeboat Saturday became an annual event in Manchester and further afield, raising money to help power RNLI volunteer crews to the rescue.

‘None is too old or too young to help the cause. Everybody can do something,’ wrote The Life-boat Journal at the time.

It’s a remarkable story – will you help write the next chapter of Lifeboat Saturday?

How to get involved

From volunteering at an existing street collection to hosting a collection at your workplace, there are so many ways you can get involved with Lifeboat Saturday 2025.