Garfield Weston Foundation
2007 Annual Report and Accounts
Welfare – £5,339,000 in 317 grants

The Children’s Trust in Tadworth has been a major beneficiary in the past and the Trustees have responded again this year to an appeal for help with building a new centre to complete the modernisation of the infrastructure. The Brain Injury Rehabilitation Programme was established in 1985 and today operates sixteen out of the total of twenty beds available for this service in the UK. Nursing and care staff, therapists and special educational teachers are dedicated towards restoring mobility and communication, redeveloping learning skills and ultimately helping the children to return to their families and communities. In recent years, the needs of the children have increased with more being unable to walk, sit up, feed or communicate. Although the therapy centre is now stateof- the-art, the residential accommodation is no longer adequate and is restricting the number of patients. A new purpose designed centre, comprising two distinct houses within one new building, is being planned for children with severe brain injuries, tracheostomies and ventilator dependency. The Trustees’ grant of £500,000 is the largest made in the Welfare category in this financial year.

A grant of £250,000 to ExtraCare Charitable Trust is being allocated to their research into methods of care and support for older people with mental health difficulties. Currently their housing schemes do not accept older people who clearly exhibit symptoms of dementia but increasingly existing residents develop mental health problems. They aim to find a way of reducing the occurrences, delaying the progress and enabling individuals to lead active, socially inclusive lives and ensure they can remain in their familiar surroundings. Results so far indicate that the Enriched Opportunities Programme offered within ExtraCare will be able to continue to support people and provide a good quality of life for them without having to move them on to nursing homes or more restrictive care. The research also aims to provide evidence of improved well-being, reduced psychiatric morbidity, improved perceived levels of social integration and social support, reduced admissions to higher dependency care and improved mortality. This will be tested over the next three years in ten ExtraCare housing schemes/villages.

The White Lodge Centre in Chertsey is replacing its outdated and inadequate Adult Resource Centre; Enham in Andover is expanding the training opportunities for disabled people with complex physical and mental health needs; the National Autistic Society is building a new residential centre at their Robert Ogden School in South Yorkshire; NCH is developing its Leaving Care programme of work; the Home Farm Trust is seeking help with capital developments in Hertfordshire and South Gloucestershire and Barnardo’s is building a new Caern Centre in Edinburgh. All are awarded grants of £100,000.

National Missing Persons Helpline, recently rebranded as Missing People, receives a second grant of £50,000 following its recent restructuring. Other charities to receive ongoing support at this level include SANE for revenue funding, the 999 Club in Deptford for the provision of three drop-in centres, Inspire in Aberdeen for its new resource centre, Queen Elizabeth’s Foundation for Disabled People for projects supporting young disabled adults, the Samaritans for training new volunteers and RAPt (the Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoners Trust) towards its general running costs.

Mental health charities throughout the UK continue to feature. For example, the Young Minds Trust receives £30,000 for core funding, a similar amount goes to the Shoreham and District Mental Health Association towards new premises, MIND (the National Association for Mental Health) is awarded £25,000 to address cultural diversity in mental health policy and practice and the Human Givens Foundation £10,000 for training in its innovative new approach to mental health. Courses have been developed for therapists where patients’ individual emotional needs are assessed, their innate resources are used more effectively and patients are helped to solve their own problems.

As in previous years, charities working with the homeless, single parents, carers, prisoners and ex-offenders, the elderly, the disadvantaged and abused all benefit with grants of varying amounts.