'Desperation on another level' - Yorkshire Children's Charity preparing for another Christmas of high demand from struggling families

Last year’s festive period was the first for the charity, which launched in January 2022. Its CEO Farrington, however, has spent many a Christmas raising funds and supporting others, having originally got involved in the children’s charity sector a decade ago.

“In my ten years of fundraising, these past 12 months, I’ve seen levels of desperation that I’ve never seen before,” she reflects. “Last Christmas was draining, emotionally. At the end of it, the team felt we had done as much as we possibly could and on Christmas morning, there would be kids waking up happy because of that. Yet you know there are still so many waking up really unhappy because the need was just so great.

"We funded every application we had in - I said sod it, yes to all, and if we need more money, we will have to go out and raise it. If we can’t help now in a cost of living crisis, then when can we help?”

The charity, Farrington says, spent around £80,000 last Christmas, with cash going towards Christmas parties for children across Yorkshire and a Christmas campaign to purchase gifts for many of the struggling families living in poverty.

This year, with two months to go, the organisation has already raised £100,000 towards the costs, but Farrington is still concerned. Demand, she anticipates, will again be unprecedented.

“With our Christmas campaign, we ask our parents to choose the gift for their children. This isn’t us doing a general appeal for Christmas gift donations, we go to families and ask what the kids would really like,” she says. "It’s a huge part of Christmas for any parent is choosing gifts and really putting thought into what their children want…

"We also decided not to wrap the presents last year because I had a mum say to us that being able to wrap and put gift tags on was the first time she’d felt like a ‘good mum’ in ages. Wrapping presents is a huge part, from a parents’ perspective of feeling like they’ve contributed to making their children happy.

“I think it’s going to be a full on Christmas again this year but we’re committed to doing the best we can to meet the demand… It will probably end up outstripping supply but like everything we do, we’ll give it our best.”

The charity exists to help children who are at a disadvantage in life due to disability, ill-health or financial circumstance.

Its work includes offering grants towards the niceties and necessities that come with children and for such items as specialist equipment and wheelchairs.

It also organises leisure experiences for young people facing hardship, and runs the Great Yorkshire Build initiative, bringing together contractors and suppliers to deliver state-of-the-art facilities to schools catering for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post in the months after the charity’s launch last year, Farrington told of bold ambitions for its “small team trying to deliver big things”.

Her goal, to raise £1million, in year one was no mean feat, but she talks proudly now of closing 2022 having generated more than double that figure. “It was an amazing year, unbelievably stressful, but for £2.7million, it was worth it,” she says.

Farrington reels off a list of statistics that are as impressive as they are concerning. In that first year, the charity helped more than 2,400 children and 32 schools, and granted 195 applications for funds.

The list of requests it receives is hugely varied, but the impact of the charity’s support always significant. Recent beneficiaries, for instance, include a family fleeing domestic violence, who were given new beds and a trip to the cinema for much-needed leisure time together.

Other heartbreaking realities are laid bare in more examples of the charity’s work.

Help for a desperate mum unable to afford to switch on the heating after buying her son a Christmas gift; specialist sensory equipment for a single mother struggling to cover the costs of items that would help her daughter with autism to soothe and regulate; new school uniform and footwear for a girl showing up to class with holes in the soles of her shoes. And so it goes on.

“The highs for me are always about our output, what we have done for our children,” Farrington says. “We have to be responsive to what our families and schools are telling us they need."

“We’ve actually seen a massive shift in the families we’re supporting,” she continues. “We’re now effectively supporting the working poor. Our parents are absolutely doing their best but their best is just not enough.”

With around a third of children in Yorkshire believed to be living in poverty, the charity, sadly, has much to focus on in its mission to “make things better” for the children of the region.

“We’re in such difficult times, it would be wrong of us to not be really responsive to the needs of our families,” Farrington says. “I think people are very proud to be from Yorkshire.... We’re all waving the flag for Yorkshire but as a region we have to do better for our children and young people. We know there’s a problem and we know it’s only getting worse.”

To find out more and support the charity, visit yorkshirechildrenscharity.org