KidsAid's recent grant success with The National Lottery Community Fund

The National Lottery Community Fund have awarded KidsAid £247,132 over a five-year period to provide long-term systemic support for 125 local children and parents.

Each year, this funding will enable us to deliver a yearlong therapy intervention to 25 local children, followed by 10 weeks of attachment support for their parents.

Trusthouse Charitable Foundation have also awarded KidsAid £90, 081 which combined with our National Lottery project will allow us to extend our support to a total of 150 families over the next five years.

National Lottery and Trusthouse have supported us to offer children with high-level need a year-long therapy intervention, alongside trauma informed psychoeducation and personal therapy for their parents / care givers.

This will support children and their families to safely process traumatic life experiences; find healthy coping mechanisms to support their long-term mental health; and to improve the parent-child relationship so that children are secure in their family unit from which they can thrive.

The KidsAid Foundation

KidsAid is a child-centred charity. We focus on prevention, healing and empowerment for children and families affected by abuse, family breakdown, illness, and bereavement through to anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide.

We take a three-pronged approach to our work with children that includes therapeutic support for the individual child, support for parents or care givers and support for professionals working with children.

Vision

To safeguard children so that early life trauma does not become a lifelong burden.

Mission

To support traumatised children and young people through the delivery of long-term, evidence-based therapies alongside innovative interventions with the aim of improving poor mental health and future life prospects.

Charity Context, Complexity of Need and Rising Referrals

KidsAid has faced a challenging year. The marked increase in children with complex needs and the severe shortage of adequate support has created significant demand for our services.

The requirement for local mental health provision rose substantially during the Covid lockdowns, and as the legacy of the pandemic is still being navigated by many young people, the need for support has endured.

Every day in our work, KidsAid witnesses the issues caused by lack of early help and preventative services as increasing numbers of young people are nearing crisis.

In the last 12 months, our dedicated staff, trustees, and supporters have worked tirelessly to help address the complex needs of vulnerable young people. We delivered 3,174 hours of therapy to a total of 257 children, and our interventions lasted an average of 35 weeks.

Supporting young people for this length of time is costly and takes significant resource. But, it is necessary. KidsAid prides itself on being an honest service, and our outcomes prove that this level of support is often required so that children can process their trauma safely and at their own pace, when they have had sufficient time to build trust with their therapist.

Alongside our interventions with young people, last year KidsAid delivered 900 hours of therapeutic support to 72 parents, who had been through their own trauma and were experiencing mental health difficulties.

Wherever possible, we adopt a systemic approach when working with young people as our experience informs us that where a child is struggling, the parent / carer and family are often struggling too. We consider caregivers' mental health a crucial determinant of a child’s wellbeing, and we understand that parents are the most significant agents of change for their children.

Grant Impact

While there are several local and national organisations offering wellbeing support and short-term therapies lasting 6-12 sessions, access to affordable long-term provision is exceptionally rare. KidsAid is the only charity in Northamptonshire and surrounding areas offering this level of support for children and young people.

Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) are oversubscribed and unfortunately many of the children referred to them do not meet the threshold for treatment and support. This has led to an increasing number of vulnerable family’s dependent upon charitable organisations and created significant demand for our services.

We are proud to bridge this gap in provision, as without our service, local children with high-level need would have nowhere to turn and be unable to overcome early years’ trauma.

Without the support from grant making trusts and community fundraising, our work would not be possible, as we do not receive any statutory funding.

Our recent grant approval from both the National Lottery Community Fund and the Trusthouse Charitable Foundation therefore represents a transformative milestone for KidsAid.

We are truly grateful to have our service recognised for this support as we know the enormous difference it will make to the lives of the families we work with.