The Postcode Community Trust (People’s Postcode Lottery) funded activity days have been hugely beneficial to a range of highly vulnerable families. Over the course of the funding we have facilitated more than 20 activity days impacting 229 individuals (97 children and young people, 132 parents and carers). These numbers are higher than we anticipated.
We’ve delivered a broad range of activities, many of which are based outside. These include farm and gardening work, mountain exploration, woodwork, woodland and fire activity day and horse riding. We’ve also involved families in a broad range of cooking activities, creative games, music (with a group of professional musicians), and involvement in a Carols for Christmas event.
The activity days have been a huge success with excellent feedback from the families. This group of children and young people are very often excluded from community events due to their complex behaviours and the activity days have allowed us to provide a high level of therapeutic support to enable them to participate fully. We are also excited to have been able to work in partnership with other local organisations and to deepen those relationships for collaborative work in the future. Without the funding, we simply wouldn’t have been able to provide these experiences for the families. We have seen children grow in confidence, engage in new activities and most significantly find ways to connect with their parents and carers in new and positive ways. ‘It’s been a life changer’, ‘just being able to spend this time together doing something enjoyable has made a huge difference’, ‘the staff have been amazing, so supportive. They really ‘get’ what it’s like and help us enjoy our children again’.
The way that we have been able to use this funding flexibly over the funding period has been extremely helpful as we have been able to fit the activity days around other events so that families could make the most of them. This way of organising the resource is definitely one that we would wish to repeat in the future. The new relationships that we have developed with local organisations will continue and we, as a service, have certainly been able to impact the understanding of these colleagues ‘I had no idea how much early trauma impacts young people’, ‘it’s been brilliant to work alongside your team and particularly to see how non judgemental and supportive you are towards the parents as well as the young people’.
