Making a difference across the region – the findings of our Impact Report.

Since 1891, Children North East has been determined to make a difference to the lives of babies, children, and young people throughout the North East of England. We’ve developed this work to the point that it now even extends across other parts of the UK. 

Each year that comes brings new changes and challenges, and each year we reflect on how we’ve addressed them in order to make a difference to young people. So, we’re very pleased to publish our 2022/2023 Impact Report, providing a detailed look at our achievements and the effect they’ve had.

The current climate: our actions in the face of adversity

In the North East and across the UK, we’ve seen policies fail to meet the basic needs of babies, children, young people and their families. The increased demand for our services has been stark, driven by the pressures of the cost-of-living crisis on families, continued cuts to funding for youth work, and the profound impact of COVID-19 on children and young people. 

In response, we’ve increased our policy work. One of the major focuses has been advocating for a basic standard of living for all, including calling on the Government to update benefits in line with inflation and scrap the two-child cap.

Now, we’re fervently campaigning for a national strategy that acknowledges and addresses child poverty (which affects a staggering 4.2 million children in the UK). Meeting the demand for our services and ensuring the stability of our core functions has been no small feat, but it’s one we’ve embraced with determination, creating spaces providing our local communities with the support they desperately need in the current economic climate.

Last March, our Cowgate space saw us open Cafe Hope: a hub for families from the local community to eat, stay warm, access services and build their support networks.

In Northumberland, where some towns have 65% of their households being identified as deprived, we’ve launched a new base to run services. Activities like these helped us grow the reach of our support by 10% this year, with 4,544 individuals accessing our services. 

A few facts and figures

From 2022 to 23, we’ve supported 4,544 individuals (the number of babies, children, young people and parents/carers accessing our frontline services and support, such as counselling, youth groups or family support). This figure represents a 10% increase in relation to last year (2021/22).

We’ve delivered 69 unique services and programmes to support babies, children, young people and families, and we’ve 1,456 in our supporter community engaged with our requests for donations, fundraising, volunteering and other types of support. This figure includes 402 individual fundraisers and 52 organisations who have donated or raised funds on our behalf (not capturing the diverse and wonderful range of groups and individuals who lend a helping hand to our teams). 

Our services and projects span every Local Authority area in the North East, and there are several areas across the UK where we’ve delivered Poverty Proofing© services to organisations.

One-off events – aside from regular services – supported families with respite and community. A much-needed day of fun taking over 70 children, teenagers, parents and carers on a trip to Cullercoats beach was a special highlight. Echoing the trip which started our charity 131 years ago, when founders John Lunn and John Watson took children from the city on a trip to Tynemouth beach to help their health, this was the first visit to the beach for some of the children. It’s an extremely powerful and important experience to provide. 

You can read more about our work supporting families in the Impact Report itself, where you’ll find case studies of specific services.

Improving and empowering young minds

Declining mental health amongst young people in the North East continues to grow year on year. In turn, this creates longer waiting lists for young people to be seen by qualified mental health practitioners, including counsellors and therapists. 

Our counselling team are adept at dealing with high referral rate, keeping waiting time to an absolute minimum (averaging six weeks). Counselling is adapted within different environments, delivering person-centred care. 100% of those accessing counselling stated their mental health has improved. 97% feel they have more strategies and feel more positive about their future.

One example of the impact of our work is our partnering with BU Wellbeing North Tyneside Learning Trust to offer 119 pupils the charity’s BU Wellbeing course: helping children and young people build resilience and develop positive techniques to manage their mental health. 

Gary Munday, Pastoral Guidance Officer at Monkseaton Middle School noted, “The children responded well to sessions, and we saw them grow into it as the weeks built up. The sessions have given students the skills, confidence, and resilience to support them to achieve.” One thing shining through feedback was the positive reflections of the pupils, with one even calling it “absolutely magnificent.”

Fundraising successes

Following pandemic restrictions, 2022-2023 was the first year we’ve seen some normality return to our fundraising calendar. Our supporters were as creative as ever: a 24-hour radio marathon, a challenge walk along Hadrian’s Wall, a zip slide from the Tyne Bridge – not to mention, of course, the iconic Geordie event, the Great North Run. 

Re-building some of our long-standing corporate relationships and developing new partnerships with businesses across the region has also been a real benefit to us. Chosen as Charity of the Year by a number of North East teams, we’ve worked closely with them on a diverse calendar of events – our Annual Fundraising Ball being one. This made a return after a pandemic hiatus, bringing many from our supporter community back together.

A key fundraiser in our work for over thirteen years is the People’s Postcode Lottery (PPL), raising £3.7m in funding by players to date. This year’s support has meant increased stability, ensuring our core functions are able to run smoothly and effectively, as well as keeping lifeline services running between funding contracts; vital support for young people and families has not been disrupted by funder timescales. 

Reaching further, raising more awareness

In 2021, there was significant growth of audiences on social media (11%) and for the newsletter (61%).

The number of website users has remained consistent with previous years, however users are now viewing more pages (by 19%) and are consuming more news and blogs shared by the charity (by 60%). 

As our UK-wide work increased, so did our audiences beyond the North East. Website audiences from London grew from an 8.2% share of visitors in 2021 to 19.6% in 2022.

We also saw the number of men in our audiences increase by 12% as part of a coordinated attempt to reach more dads and male caregivers. Improving accessibility was a key priority in 2022/23: this focus on raising awareness contributed to an increase in the use of our website accessibility support tools, including content translation by 1,230% and reading aid technology by 586%.

Moving forward to next year

View our full Impact Report here.

We’re sure you’ll agree 2022/2023 has been an impactful year for Children North East.

But we won’t stop there.

We won’t stop until every baby, child, and young person has the happy, healthy start in life they deserve. 

Your support means that we can be there when we are needed most. 

If you’re able to donate, fundraise, become a corporate sponsor, or support us in some other way, we’d be extremely grateful. 

Or for further information on our work and projects, get in touch.