Our third year (2024-25) proved to be a year of growth, and we continued to strengthen our reputation as an organisation that meets their vision of supporting low income and SEND families (Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities) in a totally inclusive, non-judgemental way. We started the year with a new pilot project, that set us off on an unexpected trajectory; one that will be a significant milestone for our organisation. The pilot - Friday Club - was full from before it launched, and was the pre-cursor to successfully being accepted onto Durham County Council’s Framework for support services for children with SEND. Our SEND provision is strong, and we have a great reputation within the community. We have continued to deliver Fun & Food sessions for Durham CC, including SEND only sessions without parents staying to allow them some respite. And we were able to employ 6 students to support this - most of whom have continued on specific projects with us, and help strengthen our team of staff. Our original community groups, The Hive & Lunch Club continued to flourish – extending provision to include a meal in both clubs, with hot food in the colder months, means we reduce the mental burden on parents and help ensure children are not hungry outside of school. Activities provided alongside align with the principles of the NHS’ 5 Ways to Wellbeing and we are also strengthening their mental health too and providing opportunities to reduce social isolation. Other community groups were running this year too; Friday Club, YouthZ and our first IVY Club, all of which were open access community groups for children from low income families and with SEND. We were approached to set up a youth group by another local community hub, and we set up our ‘Bear Pack’, which has been running for 6 months in an area of high poverty, and is providing opportunities for young people to socialise safely and learn life skills to help them as they progress through secondary school. Notably we were able to launch our remote AQA Unit Award Scheme programme with unimagined success! We have almost 250 learners registered, offering affordable access to the scheme that is often too expensive for many families. We are also working with local charity Eric Knows, allowing them to offer training and certification to their adult work placement programme. Our position as a strong business means we are able to move to self-fund more community groups. This allows us to be more responsive and flexible, to better meet the immediate and changing needs of the families we work with. In summary: We have supported 49 individual families regularly over the course of this year, with others on a less frequent basis, We have 64 children attending community groups weekly, We served 2136 meals in our Lunch Club, The Hive and Holiday Clubs.

We have continued to grow our stakeholder panel and now carry out virtual meetings quarterly. This allow us the opportunity to speak directly to our community representatives and enable us to get feedback on ideas and understand any issues that may be arising from a service user point of view rather than operational. These have been key in organising our school holiday provision especially. We also continue to gather feedback at regular intervals from all families accessing provision, and this allows us to tweak services where necessary and help plan for future sessions. We use this to contact families individually too, to collect more specific feedback to help develop our portfolio of case studies, testimonials and impact statements.

£11,790

No transfer of assets other than for full consideration