2021-12-31-accounts - The Treasure Basket Association

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The Treasure Basket Association’s Trustees’ Annual Report & Accounts (For the year ending 31 December 2021)

(CIO Reg. No.: 1185114)

Our Mission and activities in brief

The Treasure Basket Association (TTBA) was founded to help break the vicious cycle of mental-ill health, poverty and abuse affecting children who live in the most deprived parts of West Sussex.

We pursue this aim mainly -though not exclusively- through the provision of in-school Therapy to children aged 4 to 11. Currently, we deliver Play Therapy services predominantly- which include individual child sessions, emotional support to parents/carers, and training and supervision for school staff.

At present, we prioritise children who need therapeutic support urgently, and can’t access it anywhere else. However, we also work with children whose mental health needs are less severe, and aim to develop our capacity to do more preventive work in the future.

In addition, we assemble and deliver ‘Treasure Baskets’ to children from deprived households who struggle with their emotions. These are packed with sensory, play and art materials chosen to help children explore what is on their mind therapeutically.

When opportunities arise, we also initiate and deliver additional projects that align with our charitable objectives.

Our origins:

The Treasure Basket Association was “conceived” in 2015, only a few months after our founder’s first baby. Felicia -who had been working for local charity The Play Team as a Play Therapist until their retiring Trustees decided to close it- saw her time on maternity leave as an opportunity to try and help fill the gap it had left.

She knew of too many children who were falling through the net due to there being no mental health support available to them when they needed it, and - recalling consultations meetings which highlighted referral needs that could not be met- she recounts:

“Those I remember more vividly are: a recent parental death, a child’s self-harming, [...] many known cases of domestic violence and abuse [...]”. “I simply could not sit comfortably knowing what I knew”.

Thus the Treasure Basket Association was born (in 2016)

Our Main Activities in 2021 - a Year of Achievements

While TTBA has been operating since 2016, it only registered as a CIO in August 2019, not long before the start of the pandemic - which frustrated our aspirations, partly due to it causing the life circumstances of key members of our team to change significantly, and to them having to leave us as a result.

Consequently, we entered 2021 with fewer Trustees, no Treasurer or fundraisers, and only £ 4483.89 in the bank.

This notwithstanding, we did not lose our vision, nor hope. On the contrary, the year starting with a lockdown that kept most children out of schools until March motivated us to do all we could to mitigate the impact that this would have on children “distance-learning” in poor households. Thus, we intensified our efforts, so that we could provide well-stocked Treasure Baskets to as many as possible.

To this end, we reached out to our families, friends, and -using social media- to the general public. This resulted in a group of some 10 local people volunteering their time to the project, which also involved reaching out to anyone who could help us with donations in kind. As times were hard for many, we were moved by the generosity with which our request for help was met.

For instance, individuals who could not help in other ways knitted toys so that our budget for other items (such as stationery and art materials) could stretch farther.

Some hand-made items were even left outside our founder’s front door anonymously -which, as well as moving us to tears - strengthened our motivation.

Thus, we were able to distribute 90 Treasure Baskets before schools reopened. This, as well as benefiting the children, provided some of the volunteers (who had previously been experiencing social isolation) with a sense of connectedness, and purpose.

In the meantime, we invested more of our time in fundraising from grant makers, so that we could resume our work in schools as soon as they would reopen. We knew that, due to the length of funding cycles, we probably would not hear back from funders before April or May. However, our main concern was that the pandemic was having a devastating effect on the mental health of many children.

Therefore we took the calculated risk of using our unrestricted reserves to meet need until the first grants would materialise, and planned to replenish these by holding community fundraising events in the summer.

When working with children whose needs are severe, we always offer an initial block of 12 sessions. Each block costs £750 circa, and when schools reopened, we still had £4,000 in the bank.

Thus, when two schools approached us with desperate calls for help, we were able to commit to working with three pupils who were deemed to be in the most urgent need of mental health support. We consider that this was prudent in that -had no grants materialised- we would still have been able to complete these three interventions within the school year, and still have enough money left to cover both our minute overheads, including the cost of community fundraising.

As it happened, we were able to secure several grants to support our main activities (Play Therapy and The provision of Treasure Baskets), and we are particularly pleased that 3 of these (plus a donation from Worthing’s Lyons) brought in £14,500, restricted to deliver our interventions at a school we are particularly committed to, due to so many of their pupils having high levels of need, and being ‘at risk’. These funds have been enabling us to place a Play Therapist at the School, where she has been seeing six children weekly since the start of the Autumn term.

This work is ongoing, and we are working on equipping this project with sustainability, so that it may continue indefinitely. This school is based in an area of Worthing where the level of deprivation, and resulting needs, is dire.

In addition, we had two grants, totalling £5,650, to deliver in-schools Therapy and Treasure Baskets in Littlehampton, where we have also been working. On 31 December 2021 we still had £4703.67 of this money left, and we are now spending this to provide 1:1 Play Therapy sessions to three children (who will benefit from 12 sessions each). The rest will be used to either continue working with these children, if needed, or to support new referrals once the 12 weeks period is over.

A further £4,128 grant we secured (from Artworks) is to deliver an arts-based project to children with ACE in Arun (to take place in summer 2022.

Additional Activities: a Special Project

In the summer we had the opportunity to apply for a small grant from West Sussex County Council to organise a “short break” event for children with special educational

needs and/or disabilities and their families, and we did so successfully, working in partnership with another small charity, but well-established, award-winning charity (Joy of Sound).

This initiative is in line with our objectives because low levels of mental health are prevalent amongst this client group.

Short breaks, as well as providing an essential source of peer-support for families that include children with SEND, can improve the state of their mental health.

Facts and recents statistics about the social and mental wellbeing of children with SEND and their families

96% of the families who responded to a recent survey conducted by the Family Fund reported that the coronavirus pandemic has negatively affected their disabled children’s overall health and wellbeing. In particular, families reported that their disabled children’s behaviour and emotions (91%) and mental health (86%) was negatively impacted upon, and this includes disabled children and young people feeling increasingly anxious and stressed, becoming upset and experiencing more regular mood swings, as well as escalating challenging behaviour.
A survey by Contact a Family found that 65% of families with disabled children reported feeling isolated frequently or all of the time even before the COVID pandemic. However, the lockdowns made matters worse, as many of these families were cut off from friends, their support networks, and local community - which had a devastating impact on the wellbeing of children, as well as on the mental health of parents.
A survey conducted by the Disabled Children’s Partnership in March this year found that 90% of disabled children were found to be socially isolated, with nearly half of parents (49%) reporting that their child had not seen a friend either online or in person in the past month. The same survey also found that 9 out of 10 parents reported some level of anxiety and 46% had probable depression.

The short break we organised with Joy of Sound consisted of a “Fun Day Out” during which families could engage in music-making workshops and other art-based activities. It also provided opportunities for the children to engage in free play, and the adults to socialise. A free

buffet lunch was provided, and prepared taking into accounts all the suggestions that parents were invited to make when booking their place on Eventbrite.

A parent whom we emailed to clarify a suggestion before the day, replied to us saying:

“It’s so so so kind to reach out directly. X will LOVE all those snacks. So will Y too !!! We are really excited as this will be our first SEN event, we are attending so I'm also very nervous.

I hope he will enjoy it and just being able to attend is so wonderful. The world needs more people like you, so a big thank you already”

The event was attended by nine families. These included 15 adults and 19 children, including 14 children with SEND. Thus 34 individuals benefited, and levels of engagement and enjoyment were high.

As the feedback was positive, West Sussex County Council has given us a further grant to deliver three more of these “Fun Days Out”. On the 31th of December 2021 this money was still unspent, but now the first of these three events has already taken place, and the other two are scheduled to take place in March and May 2022 respectively.

Play Therapy: its impact and our plans

The number of children our Play Therapists work with each year is determined by both funding, and by each child’s therapeutic needs.

The pace at which children respond to therapy varies, and our experience is in line with several studies finding that it takes an average of 20 play therapy sessions to resolve the problems of the typical child referred for treatment. Children with complex needs can take much longer. This applies to many of the children we see because we work in areas with high indices of deprivation, where children are more likely to face ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences).

Thus, while we offer children an initial block of 6 to 12 sessions (depending on the severity of the presenting issues), we carry on seeing children until they can be discharged safely.

Typically the children who are referred to us have experienced/have been exposed to one or more of the following:

Psychological, physical and/or sexual abuse
Substance misuse
Criminal behaviour in their households
Violent treatment of a maternal figure
Bereavement
Homelesness
Abandonment
Other traumas

Our commitment to working as open-endedly as possible enhances our effectiveness. We use "Strength and Difficulty Questionnaires" that provide us with a qualitative picture of where children "are at" at the beginning and end of each intervention, on a quantifiable scale. This, and the fact that our therapists need to produce "closing reports”, enables us to determine how individual children engaged in the therapeutic journey, and the extent to which this has helped them overcome their presenting issues. Normally we find that the children we see respond well to therapy, and that they benefit from it. The feedback

we receive from families and schools is that they become more socially and academically engaged as a result.

While we are pleased with the outcome of our work, as a small charity with very limited resources, we need to balance some children’s need for long term support with the need to respond to the needs of children who need mental support urgently and who cannot access it anywhere else - a situation which is not uncommon where we live. In West Sussex, children’s mental health services were overstretched and could not meet demand even before the pandemic. In 2017-18, for instance, only 72% of the children and young people with diagnosable conditions who were referred to Coastal West Sussex CAMHS eventually received treatment, after waiting 56 days (on average) for their first appointment.

In the light of these delays, the “troubleshooting approach” we adopted during the pandemic can, literally save lives. This -responding to crises promptly- is something we want to continue doing. Thus, we will continue applying for grants to support this work.

However, we are also committed to Play Therapy as a means of preventing the life long consequences of ACEs[1] , and this often requires therapists to work with individual children long term (partially due to the fact that children with ACE are more likely to have attachment styles that make it difficult for them to establish a relationship of trust with the therapist). This -working with more children open-endedly- is something we want to do more of, and we view the grants we had to work at one particular school in Worthing (see above), as an opportunity to do so this year, and beyond.

As we have mentioned, we are aiming at equipping “the project” (i.e. the provision of play therapy services at that school) with sustainability, to make sure that more of the many children with ACE there can benefit from therapy for as long as they need. Meeting the level of need at the school, however, will require extending our presence to several days a week. To this end, we have just offered a work-experience placement to a trainee therapist and, pending our evaluation of our first experience as placement-hosts, we will be recruiting more. In the meantime, we have already applied for (and secured) a

1 There is consistent evidence that ACEs result in harmful physical, learning, social, emotional, and behavioural health outcomes during childhood, with far reaching effects lasting across the lifespan. Trauma in early life is associated with health and social problems in adulthood, including a wide range of mental and physical illnesses, suicide, homelessness, drug and alcohol use and incarceration.

small grant restricted to paying for the trainee to receive clinical supervision over the course of a school year.

Weaknesses and plans to limit risk

While our achievements highlight our resilience, and our finances are in good health, we now need to strengthen our foundations, to ensure we can keep up the good work and sustain our growth in the long term.

As it is evident from the accounts, we have not been investing in core functions and, whilst this has enabled us to use our unrestricted income to meet need at short notice, it has also made us too reliant on the unpaid labour of the key members of our team.

Our reliance on in-kind inputs that could dry up unexpectedly (as they did in 2020) poses our charity at risk, as could our over-reliance on grant income.

As well as being unpredictable, grant income is more likely to be restricted, and the sums we can raise through ‘cost recovery’ when applying for project funding are limited by (a) the size and number of our projects, and (b) by there still being funders who are unwilling to contribute to overheads. Consequently, in 2021, ‘cost recovery’ only brought in £1,260 (I.e. less than 4% of our total income).

Against this background, we consider it a priority that -as well as applying for some unrestricted grants- to pay for core staff’s time- we should develop our capacity to raise increasingly more unrestricted income through community fundraising and individual giving.

Opportunities to raise funds through community fundraising events were limited by COVID-related restrictions over the last two years, and these only brought in £1,144 in 2021. However, we consider that, now that restrictions have been lifted, there is potential for us to raise more.

While people who live in our area of benefit (i.e. people living in areas with high indices of deprivation) are unlikely to be able to support us financially, they may be able to contribute their time and skills to a new fundraising project we are planning to launch before the end of the year.

We will set up a Meet-Up group willing to handicraft items for us to sell both in person and online. We will advertise this both as a ‘social’ (for people who’d like to make new friends, and enjoy their company somewhere warm), and as a volunteering opportunity. While participants will be able to make and donate items of their choice, we are hoping that some volunteers will help us by making “build-a-bear” kits. Each kit will include the material needed to make a bear, and the bear-to-be ”birth certificate”, a card on which buyers will be able to note the name of the bear and the date on which it was completed.

This project is our own, modest, version of UNICEF Pigotta’s initiative. The Pigotta is a rag doll that groups of volunteers stuff and dress with clothes they make themselves, using their creativity and safe materials. It started in Italy in 1988, spread to other countries, and generated $18.4 million (in Italy alone) since. Our own target is that the “Meetups” will generate a profit of at least £4000 over the first year, and increasingly more in subsequent years. We would like the build-a-bear kits to eventually become a familiar symbol of our little charity which- by spreading awareness of our work- will help us grow.

We realise that threats to the local economy may reduce the likeliness of people wanting to buy our kits. However, the project will bring people from the local community together, engendering them with a sense of belonging to a group united by a common purpose. This will be an important outcome because lack of sense of belonging is an even stronger predictor of poor mental health than loneliness itself. Thus we consider that the project will succeed regardless of the extent it will succeed as a fundraiser.

Our Reserve Policy

Our current policy is that our reserves should allow us to work with children we support until they can be discharged, or referred on, safely, usually after a period of 12 weeks (3 months) on average. However, our charity needs to accumulate enough unrestricted funds to reach the point when we will be able to support the cost of core functions for at least 4 months circa (so that, if we were to cease operating, we would also be able to unwind safely). Consequently, we will work on building additional reserves until we reach that point.

Treasure Basket Assoclatlon Prrrtit and Loss Statement For the year endèd 31 Dècèmber 21r21 Totsl JOKta13Jl9. 31112r11) COME 46625 ICKXJ.Cn 2.48&25 1.280.(KI 27.M.O) 28J5aixi mrtnty FLm(tralthg TOTAL NCOME 1.144.CKI 1.144. 2.87025 2qW.C(1 31,96a25 EXPENSES Cmt. & 9thhvarn Cogi• Tralrl 87.xl 125.(Kl 125.Li) FLnthalJkng C<4ts knsLYanc 216.95 21&95 142.80 142.&1 Ollic• l G•1 Athlknlstlk Eyp•rn•• 12335 123. 91,9) o.u) 1114.31 Pflntlrg. Past and o.( 437. 28.09 2& .470.Li) 41>. Trav•1 & Sth8kn1>nc• o.( 170.84 TltIC •0[¢•• k Chroe Tr•wJf• Ba$k•t Il• 172.80 4.13 581.TJ &5738 1.4W.47 2.1 $8.1 011 Dlrect Propcts Exp 1.328. 1.328. 2.847.97 &418. 11266. Ill4.13 NEf INCOME 2228 2Q679.01 20.701. Tho Troaswo Basket A88oclallon Balanc• Sh••t As at 31 D•cemb•r 2Q1 Totsl JOAlf13Jl9- 31112r2oa Cash at Bank 25.185. 18 25.185. 18 AEPAESEKfED BY F11 Los3 Fcvward 4.483.89 4.483. 1817.78 i*xtr¢Y•r 2228 2Q879. 20.701. 6&ry.11 Profil Loss C•rf•d F(rn•d 4..17 2Q679.01 25.185.18 4483.

Signed on behalf of the Trustees by:

Simona Florio (Bookkeeping Volunteer) Felicia Lycett (Founder and Director)

Independent Examiner’s Report

I report to the trustees of The Treasure Basket Association ( CIO No. 1185114) on the accounts for the year ended 32/12/2021 set out on pages 11 and 12.

Responsibilities and Basis of Report: As the charity's trustees, you are responsible for the preparation of the accounts in accordance with the requirements of the Charities Act 2011 (“the Act”).

I report in respect of my examination of the Trust’s accounts carried out under section 145 of the 2011 Act and in carrying out my examination, I have followed all the applicable Directions given by the Charity Commission under section 145(5)(b) of the Act.

Independent examiner's statement: I have completed my examination. I confirm that no material matters have come to my attention in connection with the examination which gives me cause to believe that in, any material respect:

The accounting records were not kept in accordance with section 130 of the Charities Act; or
The accounts did not accord with the accounting records; or
The accounts did not comply with the applicable requirements concerning the form and content of accounts set out in the Charities (Accounts and Reports) Regulations 2008 other than any requirement that the accounts give a ‘true and fair’ view which is not a matter considered as part of an independent examination.

I have no concerns and have come across no other matters in connection with the examination to which attention should be drawn in this report in order to enable a proper understanding of the accounts to be reached.

Signed on 23-11-2022 by:

Shaun Tymon CPFA, 4 Duchy Avenue, Scalby, Scarborough, YO13 0S