Disadvantaged
Southend YMCA
We would like to thank the Charles S French Charitable Trust for its generous support, and would like to report that work is just about to begin on site to provide two new rooms at Newlands. The impact of this new housing capacity for vulnerable young people in our community is beyond price, and is a practical expression of care at a time when sadly, homelessness is becoming more prevalent nationally.
https://www.southendymca.org.uk
The Phab Shop
The Phab Shop Café (now named The Phabulous Café) will run as a work-based training opportunity for people with learning disabilities and additional needs. On behalf of our team, I wish to thank the Charles S French Charitable Trust for supporting our project. Your grant represented a very significant sum to us, a small charity, especially at the commencement of our fund-raising.
https://www.thephabshop.org.uk
KidsOut
KidsOut used the grant from the Charles S French Charitable Trust to support the mental and physical health of children entering the refuge system in Essex during the Covid-19 pandemic over the Christmas period. Your grant enabled KidsOut to provide 43 boxes of brand-new toys and 32 supermarket vouchers for children and families living in refuges across Essex. Between April and September, a toy box was provided to every child in refuge and with supermarket vouchers distributed every month to every family in refuge. The funding from the Charles S French Charitable Trust meant we were able to deliver more toy boxes and supermarket vouchers to new children who had entered refuge by December, many of whom had never received a gift at Christmas.
https://www.kidsout.org.uk
Young Women’s Trust
We spent your entire grant on sessional coaching fees. These are the main cost of the Work It Out service and also the most vital for young women to gain the confidence, resilience and motivation they need. There are over 1 million young women across the country who are really struggling because they’re out of work or trapped in a low paid job. This means they can’t make ends meet at the end of the month, and they struggle to afford basic things like food, rent and clothes. They are constantly worried about money and their future – which is having a major impact on their health and wellbeing. On top of this, as young women, they are more likely to face discrimination, harassment and inequality in the workplace which makes life even harder.
https://www.youngwomenstrust.org
New Horizon Youth Centre
New Horizon Youth Centre received a grant from the Charles S French Charitable Trust to part fund New Horizon Youth Centre’s Emergency Fund. This fund continues to be an essential resource, enabling us to offer individualised emergency support at a time of crisis for a cohort of vulnerable and marginalised people.
We utilised the fund as a lifeline for individuals who are caught up in a changing political and social climate and who are living in dire poverty. Welfare benefits sanctions, low wages, lack of sustainable employment opportunities, a severe dearth of suitable accommodation across all London boroughs and transient lifestyles meant that the fund was most needed to: help settle young people into accommodation; help them travel to interviews and other essential meetings; provide food after they had lost benefits through no fault of their own and re-connect them to utility services such as gas and electric suppliers.