Your contacts could change the world
13 November 2019
Charitable trusts play an important role in funding Back Up’s work – allowing us to provide life-changing services to people affected by spinal cord injury. If you have any contacts at a trust or charitable-giving foundation, we would be delighted to hear from you!
How do charitable trusts support Back Up?
Family members of newly injured people now get more vital support much earlier, thanks to a recent grant. Someone working at Baxter Healthcare knew that the company’s charitable arm – the Baxter Foundation – could support our work. She introduced us to them, and we secured funding for a new family outreach coordinator role in 2017. Today, hundreds of family members have been helped as a result.
Our under-18s work is now heavily supported by an overseas foundation. We only heard about this opportunity because someone affected by a spinal cord injury alerted us to its existence.
The National Lottery Community Fund also gave us a substantial grant towards our work. They are helping us develop a new model of peer support at the Queen Elizabeth National Spinal Injuries Unit in Glasgow. This allows Scottish patients to receive help from volunteers directly affected by spinal cord injury. We only got this ball rolling because there was so much support for this model from Scots in the spinal cord injury community. Their thoughts were influential in the funder’s final decision to support our work.
Charitable trusts and foundations make a huge financial contribution to Back Up. They total more money than the cost of all the work we do in spinal centres, hospitals and our proactive outreach calls. The spinal cord injury community have played a significant role in helping us build those funding relationships.
How can I help?
Across the country, people sit together to pore through proposals to make the world a better place. They do this as trustees of charitable trusts.
If you know any of them, tell us, as they will probably be delighted to hear from us. I’ve spoken to trusts who know about our work from friends, and they’ve just been waiting to be asked – but Back Up never knew they were interested. There are also trusts that don’t accept unsolicited applications, so they just need a friend to give Back Up an invitation.
Your friend at the trust will love you for it. We will make them extremely happy by using the funds to provide life-changing services for people affected by spinal cord injury.
Do you have a contact at a charitable trust? We would love to hear from you. Please contact our Trusts Manager Jonathan Ashton or call us on 020 8875 1805.
