New Lottery funding for children’s services
Sight Support Hull & East Yorkshire celebrates after receiving almost £20k of National Lottery funding to help local children with sight loss.
Local charity, Sight Support Hull & East Yorkshire, is today celebrating after being awarded almost £20k in National Lottery funding to support its work with local blind and partially sighted children. The group, based in Hull, will use the money to run more adapted activities for local children and to provide further support sessions for their parents.
Sight Support recognised a number of years ago that there was little support for local families and their visually impaired children. Thanks to funding from The Ideas Fund, for the last two years the charity has been working in partnership with researchers from Hull University to identify factors that affect the mental health and wellbeing of children with sight loss.
The charity now runs a wide programme of creative activities and outings, attended by 65 local children and their families, where they join in with activities such as painting, nature based activities, gymnastics, and much more. The sessions help the children to make friends, while learning new skills and having fun. While enjoyable, the children are also gaining greater confidence, self-belief and important collaboration skills.
The new funding from The National Lottery Community Fund, which distributes money raised by National Lottery players for good causes and is the largest community funder in the UK, will enable the continuation of these activities along with the employment of a specialist Children and Families Support Office and parent/carer mornings which will help them to build relationships with others experiencing the same challenges and hopefully enable them to develop their own support network.
Alison Stannard, Chief Executive at Sight Support, says: “We’re delighted that The National Lottery Community Fund has recognised our work in this way. Now, thanks to National Lottery players we will be able to press on with our plans to work with even more local children with sight loss and their parents. This is important because it helps both the children and the parents to build relationships with others facing similar challenges and to create their own supportive circles of friends and peers.”
The National Lottery Community Fund recently launched its strategy, ‘It starts with community’, which will underpin its efforts to distribute at least £4 billion of National Lottery funding by 2030.
As part of this, the funder has four key missions, which are to support communities to come together, be environmentally sustainable, help children and young people thrive and enable people to live healthier lives.
National Lottery players raise over £30 million a week for good causes across the UK. Thanks to them, last year (2023/24) The National Lottery Community Fund awarded over half a billion pounds (£686.3 million) of life-changing funding to communities across the UK, supporting over 13,700 projects to turn their great ideas into reality.
To find out more visit www.TNLCommunityFund.org.uk
