FROM helping the hungry to raising funds for poorly children, your Daily Echo has run scores of campaigns over the years – a service only we can provide.

This week we have been teaming up with local and regional titles across the UK to tackle fake news.

Over recent months and years, the Echo has backed multiple campaigns with the aim of improving the lives of residents in Southampton and Hampshire.

From our Match My Money campaign to raise funds for a new children’s emergency and trauma department at Southampton General Hospital, to backing a city charity raising money for a new van for clothes and food before Christmas last year, we have made a difference throughout the county.

Set to open in 2018, the Daily Echo backed The Murray Parish Trust in raising £4 million for the new hospital trauma centre.

The Match My Money campaign saw various businesses donate, with their money being doubled by Marchwood’s Barker-Mill Foundation, then being doubled again by the government before the end of April.

The £1 million mark has already been hit in the project launched by couple James Murray and Sarah Parish after their daughter Ella-Jayne was treated at the hospital in 2009 before passing away from a congenital heart defect.

Before Christmas, we backed a campaign for a new van for Southampton City Mission, a charity that provides food and clothes banks that feed and clothe the most needy members of the community.

In a little over a week the charity reached its £18,000 target to secure a new van.

Last summer, the future of children’s heart surgery in Southampton was also finally secured after years of uncertainty.

The Echo’s Have a Heart petition saw 250,000 people sign in response to the closure threat made to the unit in 2011. The surgical unit at Southampton General Hospital escaped a round of closures devised by NHS bosses who were planning to axe eight similar centres across the UK.

Six years ago, the unit was given a 25 per cent chance of survival but still operates today.

In January we campaigned to raise awareness of the illicit tobacco trade when we revealed that smokers could be inhaling rat droppings and even human excrement as illegal cigarettes flooded Southampton.

And last year we launched our Turn Up or Tell ‘Em initiative, to help crackdown on the number of missed GP appointments in the area.

Many local newspapers have been in existence for more than a century, with the Daily Echo bringing news, sport and entertainment to the county for more than 125 years.

They have often been a catalyst for social change, and are the conscience of a community and the defender of truth.

It’s this core value that we are striving to protect with the fighting of fake news and to continue making a difference in, and representing, the community who trust us.