Charitable trusts and foundations

Playing an invaluable role, making a huge impact on the lives of families with disabled children

Trusts and foundations play an invaluable role in helping us provide advice, information and support to families of disabled children, whatever their disability and wherever they are in the UK.

If you are a trustee, have contact with a trust or you’re thinking of setting one up, there are various ways you can make a huge impact on the lives of families with disabled children.

Supporting families where it’s most needed

Today, another 100 families will discover that their child has a disability. Most will be feeling confused, helpless and overwhelmed.

Contact is determined to reach more families and to reach them sooner. We don’t want them to reach breaking point. The support we offer empowers families to improve their wellbeing and to champion their child.

We can help build stronger and happier families where disabled children, their parents and their siblings live healthier, more fulfilled lives. But we can’t achieve this on our own.

By making an unrestricted grant your support will enable us to help families where the need is greatest, or you can choose to support one of our specific programmes.

Partnering with Pears Foundation

Through unrestricted donations to Contact, Pears Foundation provides long-term and strategic support to families with disabled children.

Find out more about our partnership with Pears Foundation

Support one of our programmes

You can choose to support:

Family Finances Programme

Designed to increase families’ financial security, so that they can focus on what really matters – enjoying life together as a family. Through our Family Finances Helpline and our range of accessible online resources and interactive webinars, families gain the confidence, resilience, and knowledge to alleviate the financial disadvantage they face.

Find out more about our Family Finances Programme

Brighter Beginnings

Brighter Beginnings is our programme of workshops that provides specialist and targeted support for families early in their journey, reflecting the needs parent carers tell us matter to them. Workshop topics range from money matters and communicating with professionals, to understanding sleep and encouraging positive behaviour.

Find out more about Brighter Beginnings

Better Together

Better Together is our series of fun and engaging activity sessions popular with families with disabled children who might not always have had the opportunity to take part in. A Better Together session could be focused on nature, art, music or sport, but not restricted to these either. Better Together activities are a great opportunity for parents to meet each other and our Parent Support Workers.

Find out more about Better Together

By Your Side

Through By Your Side, we provide targeted, face-to-face support to families whose children have recently been diagnosed with a disability or hospitalised due to their condition. Our England-wide, hospital-based Parent Advisers provide emotional and practical support to parents struggling to navigate a labyrinth of institutions, entitlements and medical jargon.

Find out more about By Your Side

We Care About Rare

Our specialist Rare Conditions Information Officer provides support to families where their child has a rare disease or condition. We maintain a highly-respected Online A-Z Directory of Medical Conditions of over 400 rare and childhood conditions, updated regularly by the large number of specialists we work with. Importantly, we also provide information on available support local to each family.

Find out more about our rare conditions support

Listening Ear

We offer 1-1 telephone appointments with a family support adviser for parent carers looking for a listening ear, reassurance and practical and emotional support. Our Listening Ear appointments are for families struggling emotionally and looking for strategies to cope.

Find out more about Listening Ear

Fledglings

Fledglings is Contact’s not-for-profit shop, supplying life-changing products, clothings and equipment for disabled children that help with their everyday challenges. Every purchase from Fledglings directly helps us to continue supporting families of disabled children with expert information and advice.

Visit our Fledglings shop

Policy and campaigns

We have achieved policy and legislative change for tens of thousands of sick and disabled children in hospital, families in poverty and children needing extra support in school. Our campaigns are trusted by families because they are shaped by what families tell us through our research, and from what we know from supporting families through our programmes of support.

Find our more about our policy and campaigns work

Find out more about supporting our work

To find out more, email our trusts and foundations team at [email protected]

Our vision is that all families with disabled children feel valued and are strong, confident and able to make the decisions that are right for them. Your generous support will help build stronger and happier families where disabled children, their parents and siblings live healthier, more fulfilled lives.