Trusts and Statutory Success Stories

Statutory and Lottery  

The National Lottery Community Fund Scotland

Since 2018, players of the National Lottery have helped offer more opportunities to even more young wheelchair users in Scotland.

A grant between 2018 and 2022 allowed Whizz Kidz to continue providing vital opportunities for young wheelchair users to continue to meet online during the pandemic, which was an especially isolating time for young people with disabilities as many other services had to be paused.

A new grant, awarded in 2023, ensures the sustainability of our activity programmes for Scottish young wheelchair users until January 2025. This enables Whizz Kidz to provide confidence-building experiences to young wheelchair users living in Scotland. We are delivering activities across Glasgow and Edinburgh which challenge young wheelchair users to learn new skills and form peer support networks, all in a welcoming and accessible environment. So far activities have included skiing, water sports, and boat trips.

Special thanks also go to the many others who made this work possible through their matched funding.

Postcode Children Trust

“Thanks to the players of People’s Postcode Lottery, over £2.5million has been awarded by Postcode Children Trust to Whizz Kidz since 2013. This has been used to support young wheelchair users across 90% of the UK.

Over 3,000 children have received equipment or repair and maintenance support since we were first awarded funding by the Postcode Children Trust. Add this to nearly 30,000 participants attending over 5,000 activities - clubs, work placements, camps and employability skills days – and you start to see how transformational this funding has been.

But it’s not just frontline services that have benefitted from this funding.

“We needed to know that what we were doing – the services we’re delivering - were having the right impact,” says Jon, Director of Services. “This is why the support we received in 2018 to help develop our theory of change was so important.

"It meant we could map our activities to short, medium and long-term outcomes, ensuring all of our services continued to do what young people wanted them to.”

Funding has also been used to leverage support from other sources, like helping to deliver our pilot in Wales between 2019 and 2021 to provide equipment for 18-25 year olds.

We are truly grateful for the fantastic support we’ve received from players of the People’s Postcode Lottery.

Trust Partnerships

The Edward Gostling Foundation

We are extremely proud and grateful for the long-standing partnership with The Edward Gostling Foundation. For more than 20 years, their support and generosity has ensured that we continue to transform the lives of disabled children and young people across the UK by providing them with vital mobility equipment, enabling greater independence and freedom.

We would like to thank The Edward Gostling Foundation for their grant helping to pilot our provision of mobility equipment to wheelchair users in Wales aged 18 to 25. We are incredibly grateful for the four year grant agreement and donation, commencing in November 2022, to help us to support wheelchair users over the age of 17, ensuring that they receive equipment at a critical time in their lives and provides them with greater opportunities to live as independent and confident young adults

Florence Nightingale Aid in Sickness Trust

We would like to say a special thanks to The Florence Nightingale Aid in Sickness Trust.

Since 2007, their support has ensured that we provide young wheelchair users up and down the UK with the equipment they urgently require.

Their continued support and generosity helps to provide 18 disabled children each year with manual wheelchairs, enabling them to gain increased independence and self-confidence, and supporting them to an active and healthy childhood.

The Gerald Micklem Charitable Trust

Whilst Whizz-Kidz is fortunate to have a number of national partnerships that help deliver our vital services, we couldn’t have possibly reached as many disabled young people as we have without the continuing kindness and generosity of our loyal local partners from across the UK.

The Gerald Micklem Charitable Trust has been supporting Whizz-Kidz every year since 2003.

They have now donated over £100,000 towards our mobility equipment provision service.

Over the years, their gifts have helped transform the lives of countless disabled children and young people in Hampshire and West Sussex, giving them the independence and freedom they deserve.

We are extremely grateful for the long standing support from the Gerald Micklem Charitable Trust.

We hope that the partnership we’ve built will continue to help more local young wheelchair users in the years to come.

ScottishPower Foundation

We were so delighted to welcome the ScottishPower Foundation as a new partner in 2019.

Their generous grant has enabled young wheelchair users to develop the skills they need to use their wheelchairs with confidence through our Wheelchair Skills Training sessions.

Their support has also helped us pilot an innovative new 'Train the Trainer' delivery model for our wheelchair skills training.

In 2020 we were thrilled to receive their runners-up Innovation Award, which recognised the fantastic adaptions we made to our equipment service, so we could keep providing vital equipment throughout the pandemic to young people who needed it the most.

We are so thankful for this fantastic partnership that’s helped to transform the lives of so many young wheelchair users.

The Kentown Wizard Foundation

The Kentown Wizard Foundation has supported Whizz Kidz since 2021. Its first grant of £250,000 provided mobility equipment to 100 young wheelchair users across the north of England and Scotland. In April 2023, they made a further, incredibly generous £345,000 donation to fund mobility equipment for under 10s across the UK. This will help us fund our new initiative, loaning mobility equipment to under-fives. We cannot wait to see the difference it will make

Further information

We value our relationships with funders and always want to know how we can work better with trusts to support the lives of young wheelchair users.

If you’d like to provide feedback or have a query, please use the button below, and one of the team will get back to you within 48 hours. We would love to hear from you!

Contact us online or email the team: TrustTeam@whizz-kidz.org.uk