Happy New Year to all our families!
3 mins read
Saturday 1 January 2022
We’re proud that we’ve been able to be there for families with disabled children throughout 2021 – another challenging year for many. As we wave goodbye to another extraordinary year, we wanted to tell you about some of the things we have achieved with your support. Last year we:
- Helped 196,000 parents with advice, support and information, and boosted family incomes on average by £5,538 a year after a call to our family finances team
- Celebrated and continued to enable 99,811 members of parent carer forums to work together with local services to influence positive change for all families with disabled children
- Cheered on our team of 23 London marathon runners who ran 26.2 miles to raise money for us.
- Produced an animation as part of our campaign to raise awareness of winter viruses in babies and toddlers
- Sent out around 3,500 copies of our Helpful Guide
- Successfully campaigned to ensure parent carers and clinically vulnerable children aged 5 -15 were prioritised for Covid-19 vaccine benefiting around half a million people.
- Delivered 521 Listening Ear appointments, our service to help with the anxiety and emotional strain felt by many parents during the pandemic.
- Welcomed 4,170 parent carers and 739 professionals who attended our online workshops, webinars and drop ins.
- Continued to lead the Disabled Children’s Partnership a coalition of nearly 100 charities to highlight the impact of the pandemic on the social care and health needs of disabled children
- Launched our Counting the Costs research to help us shine a light on the housing problems and financial devastation experienced by families as a result of the pandemic in the media, with parliamentarians, and government
- Our teams in Scotland, Northern and Wales built family confidence and resilience with a wide range of well-being sessions: Watch our Welsh team in action.
In addition, there are over 10,000 members on our private Facebook group for parents, an amazing digital community of people who go above and beyond to help one another. And we also congratulated our two big winners of Contact’s Weekly Lottery – over 600 of you now play Contact’s Lottery helping us raise vital funds so we can support more families.
We’re really looking forward to 2022, especially welcoming back our family support team in the London Borough of Lambeth.
We’d like to reach even more families in the year ahead but can only do that with your help. Please consider donating to Contact and make a life-changing difference to families with disabled children.
Take care and keep safe!
