Support Dogs celebrates receiving a grant of £15,000 from The Health Lottery Foundation

Support Dogs provides life-saving and life-changing services for children and adults affected by long-term medical conditions. For over 30 years it has achieved this by providing specialist assistance dogs for autistic children, as well as for people with epilepsy or a physical disability.

The funding awarded is from The Health Lottery Foundation, which distributes money raised by players of The Health Lottery.

The purpose of The Health Lottery is to raise money to improve the health and wellbeing of people across Britain.

Danny Anderson, Support Dogs’ head of fundraising, is looking forward to using the money awarded to provide more dogs to change the lives of even more families.

He said: “We are excited to receive this funding and look forward to being able to fund an instructor to support our services for our disability assistance programme.

“It’s come at a fantastic time, as this grant will enable us to deploy funds to this area, while we push on with our Capital Appeal to raise £2.4m for our new headquarters, Elsworth House, near Hillsborough.”

The Health Lottery Foundation currently supports projects that work across six key areas including: chronic disease, disability inequity, health disparity, healthcare IT, preventative care and young people.

Delva Patman, chief executive of The Health Lottery Foundation, explained: "By focusing on six themes, we aim to support projects across a wide breadth of society.

“All sorts of organisations will be eligible to apply, from small community projects to national charities. We will allocate funds where we think the money can make the biggest impact. We are looking forward to hearing more from projects in Britain delivering vital work to support health and wellbeing.”

Health Lottery players have raised over £134 million for good causes over the past decade.

To find out more about the incredible work of Support Dogs, please visit www.supportdogs.org.uk or call 0114 2617800.

Visit www.thehealthlotteryfoundation.org.uk to find out more about its funding opportunities.