Yorkshire Children’s Charity is on a mission to transform the lives of the region’s most disadvantaged children and young people. We speak to the organisation’s CEO, Charlotte Farrington, about the story behind its success and discover what motivates her the most while making a difference in the place she calls home.
There are some moments in life that stay with us forever – often leaving a lasting imprint on our memory and perspective. Sometimes, even shifting the course of our entire lives. For Charlotte Farrington, it was a conversation with a seven-year-old girl that would change everything.
“I was working in marketing at the time and found myself saying yes to some volunteering at a national children’s charity in Sheffield – of which my boss at the time was Chair,” she recalls.
“We took the children on a class trip and, after lunch, one of the young girls kept asking me if she could take home some of the leftover cheese sandwiches.
“She kept fretting, worrying that I’d forget to give them to her once it was time for her and the rest of the children to go home. She was relentless and I remember being really confused as to why it was so important to her.”
Later, Charlotte learned that the young girl would often take food home with her from school to help feed her three younger siblings.
“It floored me,” says Charlotte, still visibly moved at the thought of it.
“She was so worried that, because we’d taken her out of school for a day, it would mean she’d go home empty-handed. All she cared about was being able to feed her family.
“Imagine having that sort of responsibility on your shoulders at just seven years old? I couldn’t fathom it. I couldn’t believe there were children living like that – and right here on my own doorstep, too.
“It was a moment that I’ll never forget and she will forever be the reason why I do what I do today.”
Inspired to help more children in need, Charlotte continued volunteering at the children’s charity, before landing a permanent job there.
“After nearly a decade of working in marketing, the thought of switching gears and working with children sounded like so much fun,” she says.
“I’ll never regret making the jump, but looking back, I guess you could say I was a little naïve. What I didn’t realise was how consuming working for a charity is.
“Don’t get me wrong – it’s a huge privilege – but it’s all-consuming. In fact, I don’t see it as a job – it’s a vocation. You live and breathe it and that’s exactly what I did.”
Charlotte spent the next 10 years heading up the charity’s northern arm, before deciding to take another leap of faith – starting a charitable organisation of her very own, dedicated to the disadvantaged children belonging to the place she grew up in.
“For lots of reasons, I felt I could help kids in Yorkshire more efficiently and in a bigger and more meaningful way,” she says.
“I also wanted to be able to look people in the eye and tell them, truthfully, where their money was going – and that was, and still is, directly to the families who are in desperate need of support.
With her friend and now colleague, Annabel Robinson, at her side, she worked tirelessly to bring her dream to life, all the while juggling motherhood and the inevitable demands being a parent brings.
Soon enough – in January 2022 – Yorkshire Children’s Charity was born.
“The business started, quite literally, from my kitchen table. We had £7,000 in the bank and no clue where the journey was going to take us,” she says.
“At the time, I was on maternity leave with a newborn, while parenting a two-year-old, while still doing the odd job for the charity I’d just left, while setting up my own business. It was a crazy time in my life – I’ve never juggled like it – but we got there in the end.”
From humble beginnings – and in just a couple of short years – Yorkshire Children’s Charity has grown into one of the region’s leading and most successful organisations, raising £2.7 million for those in need in its first year alone.
Through its grant giving programmes and long-term project work, the charity exists to help struggling children and families due to disability and additional needs, ill health and financial circumstance.
Individual grants provide families with vital funds to buy essential specialist equipment, such as wheelchairs and bath hoists, to help children feel more comfortable, gain more independence and thrive in their own environment, as well as grants to cover necessities such as shoes and clothing.
In the world of education, schools are offered aid through the charity’s Schools Out programme and The School Network, which place volunteers within schools to provide practical and tangible support, as well as giving teaching staff and families facing hardship some much-needed respite.
Non-profit organisations, including sports clubs, youth clubs, self-help groups and voluntary groups, can also access much-needed grants to help them continue their worthwhile work and support within Yorkshire’s communities.
Elsewhere, its projects, such as The Great Yorkshire Build, see the charity join forces with the region’s building services to create state-of-the-art learning facilities and schools, in which teachers can give children with special needs and disabilities the best education possible.
With the help of people in professional services, such as architects, quantity surveyors, builders and project managers, the charity is able to give back to a society that is crying out for investment – and some tender love and care.
“If you’re from Yorkshire, you’re usually really proud to wave the flag for where you’re from, but the reality is that we’re catastrophically letting our children down,” says Charlotte.
“The figures speak for themselves – one in three of our children are living in poverty and we are the third worst UK nation when it comes to child poverty and deprivation.
“Safe to say, we have so much work to do – and that’s why our grant giving programmes, initiatives like The Great Yorkshire Build, along with our annual fundraising events, are so crucial.”
Since its inception, the team behind Yorkshire Children’s Charity has steadily grown from two to nine. Supported by a board of hand-picked trustees, each person shares Charlotte’s burning determination to make lasting change.
“There are no politics involved behind closed doors, nor is there a hierarchy. Every decision is made together in the best interests of the children we’re here to support, explains Charlotte.
“If we’re succeeding, we’re succeeding as one. If we’re in the trenches, we’re in the trenches together. That’s just how we work.
“It’s quite mad to think how much we’ve grown in such a short space of time and I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved so far.
“It’s hard to pin-point particular highlights – there have been so many – but some of my happiest memories have been building a £1 million special needs school in Skipton through The Great Yorkshire Build and the success of our launch event at Grantley Hall back in 2022.
“We raised a staggering £850,000 for children across Yorkshire and Prince Albert II of Monaco and his family were in attendance as our guests of honour. It was an amazing evening.
“Monetary achievements aside, we’ve also come a long way in understanding who we are. Everything from what we believe in to how we behave and how we want to stand out. That has been a journey in itself and we’ve experienced real growth in that respect, too.
“That said, there is still so much we want to achieve. There is always more to do – it never ends – and together we’re determined to keep going.”
With their eyes firmly on the future and their minds fixed on how they can make even more difference to more lives, Charlotte and her team are preparing for an eventful six months ahead with hopes of making 2024 the charity’s most successful year yet.
Soon, work will begin on the charity’s next Great Yorkshire Build project – a brand new school for children with special educational needs in Rotherham.
Come early summer, the charity will kick off its calendar of flagship fundraising and social events, including The Yorkshires Commercial Real Estate Awards in May and The Yorkshire Polo in June.
The latter part of the year will see the charity host its annual A Night Under the Stars event at Grantley Hall – during which Charlotte hopes to raise £1 million to help 25,000 children during the colder months – as well as deliver its Winter Essentials campaign.
“For those living in poverty, the winter is an exceptionally hard time of year and, through our campaign, the aim is to deliver children and families with the basic needs most of us don’t think twice about,” says Charlotte.
“It’s about all those children who turn up to school in nothing but a t-shirt in freezing temperatures, in shoes with holes in them, in pants they’ve already worn for days. The kids who don’t own a winter coat and who are too cold and hungry to even be in a position to learn. That’s who we do it for.”
The campaign is one of the charity’s most successful initiatives. Local schools reported a 26% increase in attendance due to the amount of winter school shoes it was able to provide, while 83% of schools said they were able to keep children off safeguarding registers over Christmas thanks to its intervention.
During the Christmas period, the charity, along with its volunteers, will go above and beyond to spread festive cheer to those who need it most, including delivering up to 9,000 presents to some of Yorkshire’s most impoverished families.
“We donate £100 per child and give all our parents the chance to pick out gifts they know their children will love,” explains Charlotte.
“We then pack and deliver their chosen items, along with everything the parents need to wrap them and to be able to pop them under the tree ready for Christmas morning, so the kids think Santa has paid them a visit.
For Charlotte, it encapsulates what she loves most about what she does.
“It’s always a joy to see a child’s face light up when they realise they get to write their name in a winter coat for the first time – instead of crossing out someone else’s,” she says.
“These are children who are used to receiving the odd hand-me-down – and that’s only if they’re really lucky – so to be able to give a child something new of their own, is a wonderful feeling.”
With so much in the pipeline, Charlotte is all too aware of the dedication, energy and strength required to succeed and meet her ambitions. The thing that keeps her going and the thing she holds on to, she tells us, is the unique perspective her role provides.
“My work means I’m acutely aware of the hardships of others, which has given me such grounding in life,” she says.
“Every day is a reminder of how lucky I am. I’m a mother of two healthy children, who are clean and warm and who always go to bed with full tummies. They know, unequivocally, that they are loved and safe. But I know that isn’t the case for every child.
“When I receive an application for a little boy – the same age as mine – who’s having hundreds of seizures a day and who needs specialist equipment to help him breathe, I can’t help but read it through a mother’s eyes and be touched by it. It’s impossible not to.
“But, in the end, that’s drives me most. That’s what puts the fire in my belly. I just want to do the best I can for these children and these families – and I think I’m really lucky that, somehow, the charity sector found me and I get to do it.”
www.yorkshirechildrenscharity.org
