A BUSINESSWOMAN has raised more than £1,500 after braving a charity skydive in memory of her grandmother.

Beki Stevenson, owner of Berber Leather in Richmond, completed the skydive last month for Alzheimer's Society.

Miss Stevenson completed the tandem skydive in memory of her grandmother who passed away from the disease in 2017.

The jump was part of the Alzheimer’s Society One Giant Leap which sees hundreds of people across the UK taking part in tandem skydives whilst raising thousands of pounds for the charity.

Miss Stevenson's initial target was £500 but generous sponsors have helped her to raise more than three times the amount with donations still coming in.

She said: “I actually got a call from the Alzheimer’s Society to say I was one of the top three fundraisers in the country for the October jump, so a big thank you to everyone who helped me get to that amount.” The money raised will be used by the society to further research into the disease and also to provide care and support for Dementia sufferers.

She added: “It was an absolutely exhilarating experience. “It’s something I’ve always quite fancied doing. When I looked into doing a skydive I read about the Alzheimer’s Society’s One Giant Leap and it seemed a perfect fit for what I wanted to do.”

Alzheimer's Society is committed to spending at least £150m over the next decade on dementia research to improve care for people today and find a cure for tomorrow.

This includes £50m to develop the UK’s first dedicated Dementia Research Institute. There are 850,000 people with dementia in the UK, with numbers set to rise to over one million by 2025. Despite these figures, dementia research is desperately underfunded. For every person living with dementia, the annual cost to the UK economy is over £30,000 and yet only £90 is spent on dementia research each year.

Miss Stevenson is still accepting donations via https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/bekistevenson.