Norwood dinner raises £2m to support charity’s services
Learning disabilities and autism charity announces refocused strategy to support vulnerable children and families
Six hundred guests helped raise an impressive £2m for Norwood, the UK’s oldest Jewish charity, at its annual dinner.
The gala event last week brought together people supported by the charity and their families and staff.
Chief executive Naomi Dickson said: “Everyone you meet on a visit to a Norwood location plays such a vital role in creating the inclusive culture we strive to achieve at Norwood. Every individual is celebrated for their strengths and supported to achieve their ambitions, whatever challenges they may face along the way.”
Norwood chair of trustees Miles Webber said: “Only one of our four services receives any kind of statutory funding, and that is under the most serious pressure in decades. Throughout Norwood’s 230-year history, we’ve always been able to adapt, as the needs of the people we support and attitudes to supporting them, have changed.”
As he outlined the charity’s plans to refresh its support for “these vulnerable children and families, proudly building on our legacy of serving our community”, he added “having spent the past year scoping the needs of our community, working with some of the UK’s leading social care experts, we are ripe to adapt with a new refocused strategy to best support them”.
Plans include an easy to access needs-based advice and triage service, signposting everyone who walks through it to the right pathway of support; refreshing Norwood’s children and family services to deliver coaching, professional advice and advocacy, therapy and short breaks provision to support the needs of the whole family, regardless of diagnosis; a transition service to help prepare neurodiverse young people for the next stage in their lives; and modernising Norwood’s adult services provision.
Evening speakers included Nicolas Hamilton, the first racing driver with a disability to compete in the British Touring Car Championship and half-brother of Formula 1 racing driver Lewis Hamilton. Born with cerebral palsy, he shared with guests how, having been told as a child that he would never walk and having endured years of gruelling training to walk unaided by the age of 17, he then trained to realise his dream of being a racing driver.
Paying tribute to Norwood’s community-based provision, he commented on how children and families supported by Norwood feel “at home, a part of their community”, an experience he lacked during his childhood.
The ‘Us and Our Future’ themed event was sponsored by The Lord Leonard and Lady Estelle Wolfson Foundation.
Norwood needs to raise £12m in voluntary donations from the community every year and estimates that the government’s budget announcement last week of increases to employers’ National Insurance contributions and the minimum wage, will increase its costs by up to £2m annually.
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