DECEMBER 2022
WILLOW’S RAINBOW BOX
CHARITABLE INCORPORATED ORGANISATION: (REGISTERED NUMBER 1186779)
ANNUAL REPORT
Including Receipts and Payments Accounts for the Period from 1 July 2021 to 30 June 2022.
Section 1: The Charity
Willow’s Rainbow Box is a registered CIO that aims to support women and families going through a new pregnancy following a pregnancy loss or neonatal loss. The charity’s focus is to help reduce anxiety and promote positive mental health and wellbeing for families going through this journey, through the provision of online support throughout the UK and physical goods/services in Newcastle upon Tyne and surrounding areas. The charity has seven dedicated Trustees - all of whom bring different angles and experience to the work of the charity. The Trustees work to the highest standards and represent the three Charity values: empathetic, approachable, supportive.
Section 2: Message from Chairperson and Founder - Amneet Graham
The last 12 months have been about recovery after Covid and being able to properly restart our services. We were fortunately able to resume our box service in April 2021 and since then we have also worked on growing our team and developing our strategy and planning for the coming years.
This report will cover the activities of the charity from the last 12+ months, as well as plans for the future and accounts for the year.
Section 3: Activities from the past year
Boxes:
We resumed our comfort box service in April 2021. To help reduce contact and spread of the virus, we moved to box postage rather than collection. We have posted 30 boxes since we started our service again. We opened up our box service to Northumberland, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Gateshead, Newcastle, Sunderland and Durham. We have been able to successfully financially sustain this service. We also opened up our rainbow boxes survey again to the public to find out what items they would find useful for a comfort box in pregnancy after loss. As a result of this survey, we added in a new adults colouring book page with coloured pencils. We also created a new business card resource for people to hand to anyone giving them care, which simply says ‘Hello! I am pregnant after loss. This journey might be difficult for me. Please keep this in mind whilst supporting me.’
Language:
We took some feedback from people in our community about the term ‘dads and partners’ describing a new resource we created last year. There was some pushback on this term from people in LGBTQ+ communities who felt that ‘partners’ was othering. We put out a few
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polls via social media and have settled on ‘Resources for the other parent’ to describe this important resource. We hope this will improve the inclusivity of our resource.
We also took the decision to change the language used about our service provision to include both ‘women and birthing people.’
Private scanning vouchers:
The board of trustees decided to stop going ahead with the private scan vouchers due to lack of uptake. We are keen to support any work in the baby loss community that actively campaigns for further scans and support for people pregnant after loss.
Baby Loss and different communities:
We started our work into highlighting baby loss in different communities by creating our South Asian baby loss mini series in 2020. In November 2021, we released our second series which was our ‘Black baby loss mini series.
In 2022, we launched our LGBTQ+ baby loss mini series - highlighting stories from people in these communities and amplifying voices. The series was well received and we thank contributors for sharing their stories.
It’s important to us that we hear from a diverse range of communities about baby loss - as this also helps to break silence and cultural taboo around loss and increase support for subsequent pregnancy.
Social Media:
The charity has grown on social media, with over 1080 Twitter followers, over 1080 Instagram followers and over 600 followers on Facebook. We have stopped Rainbow Baby Hour temporarily whilst we discuss new themes and ideas. In August 2022, we ran our biggest social media event so far. We ran a week long social media campaign’Rainbow Baby Week.’ This was a week full of interviews and messages from Trustees about how Willow’s Rainbow Box began, Instagram Live sessions with special guests such as Kicks Count CEO Elizabeth and Dad Matters Operational Manager Kieran Anders. We also launched our new business card resource, created a giveaway of our box to someone in any area of the country, opened our web shop and created a series of engaging content throughout the week. The purpose of the campaign was to raise awareness of our work and we gained a good social media following during the campaign. The whole team worked so hard on this week, but a particularly big thank you to Gemma our Social Media admin who
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created much of the content and schedule. There is appetite from the community for us to run this week again in 2023 and there are other charities interested in being involved next year.
Our Instagram peer support groups are still going too with regular new participants.
Fundraising:
The charity continues to be funded on the generosity of individual giving and from our own small fundraising events. In October 2022, we started working on applications for funding to assist us with our activities. We are also actively recruiting an online community fundraising volunteer to help us with creating fundraising events.
Trustees:
In the last 12 months, we recruited 2 new Trustees to the Willow’s Rainbow Box team. Steph joined us as the Willow’s Rainbow Box Co-Chair and Nicola joined us as our new Communications and PR manager. Both have joined the charity as Trustees. We sadly said goodbye to Ruth from our Trustee board.
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Section 4: Future plans for the next year
At present, our boxes are still only available for people in certain areas of the North East. We did some social media research to find out how people felt about us expanding our boxes to other areas of the country and the idea was well received. Our plan is to try and secure funding for our work in the North East. We then plan to open our boxes in Nottingham and Sheffield by mid 2023. We have 2 members of the team with good links in these areas and feel this would be a good place to trial an expansion of our services.
We have exciting plans in conjunction with CiC Mindful Therapies in Newcastle upon Tyne. Mindful Therapies has a team of therapists who offer donation based counselling and mindfulness groups. We have been working with them to create a 10 part mindfulness programme for people pregnant after loss. Initially this will take place in Newcastle at the Mindful Therapies venue, but we do plan to create an online programme that will be open to people all over the UK.
In the previous Annual Report, we talked about launching regular Zoom support sessions for pregnancy after loss. We did a couple of these but due to ill health we weren’t able to do anymore. We do plan to launch these again in 2023, facilitated by our Chair Amneet who has facilitation experience and is safeguarding trained with DBS.
In terms of fundraising, we will look at grants and bids as a source of income over the coming year. We will also plan for more virtual fundraising such as another virtual race. We will explore more virtual community fundraising ideas.
The charity plan to expand on the ‘Baby loss in different cultures and communities’ section of the website, covering more communities and cultures. There may also be plans to get involved with other organisations working in different communities and cultures and to link up with some digital work and podcast opportunities.
The charity will continue to build its website with more digital forms of support and resources for beneficiaries.
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Section 5: Accounts
| Receipts and Payments for the Year Ended 30 June 2022 |
||
|---|---|---|
| Unrestricted Funds 2022 |
Total funds 2021 |
|
| £ | £ | |
| Receipts | ||
| Donations | 520 | 379 |
| Fundraising receipts | 251 | 23 |
| Other income | - | 150 |
| Total receipts | 771 | 552 |
| Payments | ||
| Materials | 191 | 20 |
| Shipping | 44 | 37 |
| Insurance | 183 | 183 |
| Promotions | 10 | |
| Total payments | 428 | 240 |
| Net receipts for the period | 343 | 312 |
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| Statement of Assets and Liabilities as at 30 June 2022 |
||
|---|---|---|
| Unrestricted funds | Unrestricted funds | |
| 2022 | 2021 | |
| £ | £ | |
| Cash funds | ||
| Cash at bank | 1092 | 749 |
| Total cash funds | 1092 | 749 |
The accounts were approved by the Board of Trustees and authorised for issue on 7th December 2022. 28th December 2022
Section 6: Trustees, volunteers and acknowledgements.
The charity would like to thank the Trustee Board for 2021/2022:
Amneet Graham - Trustee and Chair
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Jennifer Dowson - Trustee and Secretary
Anthony Wardle - Trustee and Treasurer
Katherine Hately - Trustee
Leeanne Wanless - Trustee
Ruth Kelly - Trustee (creative and design) (Resigned)
Steph Phillips - Trustee and Co-Chair
Nicola Richards - Trustee and Communications and PR Manager
Charity Volunteers:
Elly Roper - Website Co-ordinator
Gemma Morris - Social Media Admin
Chris Weaver - Website donation
Lisa Stephenson - Fundraising Manager
Partners/corporate in 2022
Mindful Therapies CiC
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Contact details:
Website: www.willowsrainbowbox.co.uk
Email: hello@willowsrainbowbox.co.uk
Facebook: @willowsrainbowboxproject
Twitter: @Willowsrainbow
Instagram: @willowsrainbowbox
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