The JOYBANK Trustees Report for 1.1.2023 - 1 . 1. 2024
Jessa’s JOYBANK developed from a homebased initiative providing toys and craft packs to families using food banks in Sheffield during the Covid pandemic.
We became a registered Charitable Incorporated Organisation in February 2022 with a board of 5 trustees from different faiths and backgrounds. All trustees give
their time voluntarily and receive no remuneration or other benefits.
Charitable Aims and Objectives:
Our charity's main purposes are :
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to promote the central importance of creative play to children’s development
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to educate about sustainability and helping others
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to relieve poverty by providing toys to families who are in conditions of need, hardship or distress by reason of their social and / or economic circumstances.
What We Do
We are a volunteer- run Toy Bank. In order to achieve the above aims, we collect donations of unwanted toys which are sorted, checked, cleaned and packaged into JOYBAGS. These iare given out free of charge through individual referrals and via frontline workers supporting children and families including teachers, health
visitors, social workers etc We also provide to food banks, other charities and community organisations supporting disadvantaged children.
We network and collaborate with a wide range of voluntary and statutory services city-wide. We also provide outreach support and advice to families about appropriate toys and how to engage with children in play.
Ensuring our work delivers our aims:
The trustees review the aims and objectives and consider what we are achieving against these aims and in relation to our own action plans.
All our services are provided without distinction of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, disability or faiths. This is also a requirement we make from the other agencies and organisations with whom we work who request toys. However, we also emphasise that our purpose is the provision of support to disadvantaged children.
Public Benefit:
The trustees have complied with the duty as laid out in the Charities Act 2011 to have due regard to public benefit guidance . We regularly consult and seek feedback from the agencies we whom we work to understand whether our activities are to the public benefit and how we can improve our services to meet community needs.
For many families struggling to feed their families toys cannot be a priority. Yet creative play is essential for children’s well being and healthy development. Play in the early years also has a major impact on educational achievement. Toys are the tools of play.
Lockdown revealed the many families live in ‘toy poverty’ without the play resources to entertain, let alone educate their children at home. This affected the mental health of both children and parents. The educational opportunity ‘gap’ is now a chasm!
The current cost of living crisis highlights that since the pandemic, over 1 in 4 children in the North still live in extremes
poverty. Meanwhile, more affluent families often have an overabundance of good quality pre-loved toys which often end up in landfill and oceans.
The JOYBANK’s mission is to Recycle, Redistribute and Reuse these toys for the benefit of all
: Operations
We run a community toy bank where we recycle donations make and ready for distribution.
We support a wide range of children and families in this manner including children living in difficult situations, looked after children, families who are struggling financially, young parents, children with complex needs, and homeless families. These children and families are referred to us for support by teachers, healthcare workers and family and community workers at organisations including schools, hospitals, local authorities, migrant, refugee and women’s refuge centres, community centres and other local charities.
This year the JOYBANK provided over 2000 toys to vulnerable children in the Sheffield area.
The agencies we supported included 6 primary schools and 3 special schools: social workers; Multi Agency Support Teams; food banks, community centres, play groups; adventure playgrounds; other charities such as The Red Cross, Shelter , The Refugee Council., Sheffield Children’s Hospital and Women’s Aid.
In addition we worked extensively with women and families seeking asylum and living in Home Office accommodation. We regularly distributed toys, bikes and outdoor play resources to children living in hotels. We also provided board games, puzzles and craft materials as well as toiletries, prayer mats and modest clothing to women in hostels.
We fund our activities by selling some toys in our retail shop on 2 afternoons a week.
HIGHLIGHTS
Following our 2nd busy Christmas when we distributed 500 JOYBAGS of gifts our financial year began with a huge tidy-up. We were also surprised that so many toys continued to arrive as families
donated unwanted presents. We were grateful to the many families who brought their children to help us unpack
Since we try to provide new toys for birthdays, in January we also visited the International Toy Fair at Olympia and spoke about our work and the importance keeping toys out of landfill and oceans. We were excited to hear about how many companies are also concerned about sustainability using recycled plastic. A week later, we were delighted to receive a large delivery of toys from Geomag, and have been receiving surplus stockroom other manufacturers throughout the year.
This meant that we had to increase and reorganise the storage space we rent in Highfield Trinity Methodist Church. We couldn’t have done this without the help
of teams of workers from local companies who sent teams of workers who volunteered their ‘charity days’ to support us. Gripple erected new shelving…and gave us a generous donation. The Home Office and a local bank helped us sort and organise. Local families also came with their children to help us unpack.
In Spring we were once again provided gifts community Eid celebrations. We also continued to supply toys to children and families seeking asylum living in hotels, and games and crafts to women in home office hostels.
As the demand for toys continued to grow enormously during the cost of living crisis we struggled to deliver all the toys personally to homes. So throughout the year we continued to actively developed our network of relationships with other groups and organisations supporting children and families in need. This enabled us to create a referral system for teachers, community workers and multi-agency family social workers to make referrals & make sure the toys went directly into the hand of children in need.
We have also been thrilled that our community work is beginning to have an impact in local schools. Many individual children bring their unwanted toys to the JOYBANK. Some have even requested that their birdie party guests give them a present wrapped for another child. Some schools have discussed recycling and sustainability with their classes, and have then held preloved toys drives. All of this enables even young children not only begin to understand about social inequality and poverty, but also be able to do something to help others.
Throughout the year our shop has become a huge success……
Growingnumbers of local children & families now visit us to buy pre-loved toys for presents . Some seek help and advice about appropriate toys for different agegroups and special needs. Many also come to play, which provides parents with an opportunity to learn about what their own kids enjoy as well as meet and chat with others In many ways the JOYBANK is becoming a new community hub that promotes social cohesion conversation and conviviality. This year we have begun to use the phrase ‘ Help the Planet, Help Your Pocket, Help a Child in Need’
This year, grants from the South Yorkshire Cost of Living Fund and the National lottery helped us sustain and develop our activities and employ a part-time project worker. We are a volunteer led and run charity and until this grant were entirely self-funded. Obviously, the cost of living crisis has also affected us, as our rents and overheads increased significantly.
A huge boost to our morale was being able to afford to paint the front of the JOYBANK, print new leaflets and purchase a banner to take with us to community events,
Throughout the summer we promoted ‘A SUMMER OF PLAY’. We ran Teddy Tombolas in schools and community groups and provided toys to many local holiday play schemes
At the beginning of the September, we continued our ‘Keep Kids Reading’ project. We distributed loads of books to schools both for classroom libraries and to give to the many children who have never had a book of their own.
Toy Libraries became a new project for us and we trialled our first one in a local nursery. We plan to develop this initiative in the coming year
We also continued to work with Local Authority agencies, providing toys for launch new family hubs, brick clubs and lego therapy and Children in Care events
In December we ran a stall in local community market where we were the nominated charity,
Our main activity at the end of the year was packing JOYBAGS for families who could not afford to buy gifts. We do not wrap them so parents and carers can give presents according to their own holiday traditions
We try to include a new toy for every child in a family along with pre-loved books, puzzles, games and soft toys…..all of which are laundered and thoroughly checked. We couldn’t do this without the support of toy companies. This year we were particularly thrilled to receive £1000 of vouchers to spend on new Lego. We also purchased many toys from the fabulous In Kind Direct which provides amazing and essential support, particularly to small charities like us. We also provided toys for ‘Father Christmas’ at local community celebrations
Charity Name No (if any) The Joybank 1197830 Receipts and payments accounts CC16a For the period Period start date Period end date To from 1.1.23 1.1.2024
Section A Receipts and payments
| A1 Receipts | Unrestricted funds to the nearest £ 6,548 500 300 7,500 - - - - 14,848 - - - 14,848 7,600 4,500 279 572 3,069 143 627 371 174 17,335 - - - 17,335 - 2,487 - - - 2,487 |
Restricted funds to the nearest £ - - - 9,764 - - - 9,764 - - - 9,764 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 9,764 - - 9,764 |
Endowment funds to the nearest £ |
Total funds to the nearest £ 6,548 500 300 7,500 9,764 - - - 24,612 - - - 24,612 7,600 4,500 279 572 3,069 143 627 371 174 17,335 - - - 17,335 7,278 |
Total funds to the nearest £ 6,548 500 300 7,500 9,764 - - - 24,612 - - - 24,612 7,600 4,500 279 572 3,069 143 627 371 174 17,335 - - - 17,335 7,278 |
Last year to the nearest £ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| shopsales | 6,548 | - - - - - - - - - |
6,548 | - | ||
| Gripple | 500 | 500 | - | |||
| RotaryClub | 300 | 300 | - | |||
| South Yorkshire CommunityFund | 7,500 | 7,500 | - | |||
| National LotteryCommunityFund | - | 9,764 | - | |||
| - | - | - | ||||
| - | - | - | ||||
| - | - | - | ||||
| Sub total(Gross income for AR) |
14,848 | 24,612 | - | |||
| A2 Asset and investment sales, (see table). |
||||||
| - | - - - |
- | ||||
| - | - | - | ||||
| Sub total | - | - | - | |||
| Total receipts A3 Payments |
||||||
| - | 24,612 | - | ||||
| Shoprental | 7,600 | - - - - - - - - - - |
7,600 | - | ||
| Storage costs - Highfield Church | 4,500 | 4,500 | - | |||
| Insurance & Utilities | 279 | 279 | - | |||
| Wages | 572 | 572 | - | |||
| Toy purchase InKind | 3,069 | 3,069 | - | |||
| Stationery/packaging | 143 | 143 | - | |||
| Printing/marketing | 627 | 627 | - | |||
| Premises maintenance & fittings | 371 | 371 | - | |||
| Miscellaneous | 174 | 174 | - | |||
| **Sub total ** | 17,335 | 17,335 | - | |||
| A4 Asset and investment purchases, (see table) |
||||||
| - | - - - |
- | ||||
| - | - | |||||
| **Sub total ** | - | - | - | |||
| Total payments Net of receipts/(payments) A5 Transfers between funds A6 Cash funds last year end Cash funds this year end |
||||||
| - | 17,335 | - | ||||
| - 2,487 | 9,764 | - | 7,278 |
- | ||
| - | - | - - |
- | - | ||
| - | - | - | - | |||
| - 2,487 | 9,764 | - | 7,278 | - |
CCXX R1 accounts (SS)
28/01/2025
1
Section B Statement of assets and liabilities at the end of the period
| Categories Signed by one or two trustees on behalf of all the trustees B1 Cash funds B2 Other monetary assets B4 Assets retained for the charity’s own use B5 Liabilities B3 Investment assets |
Signature Details Details Details Details Total cash funds (agree balances with receipts and payments account(s)) Details |
Unrestricted funds Restricted funds to nearest £ to nearest £ 7,278 - - - - - 7,278 - Agreement Error Agreement Error Unrestricted funds Restricted funds to nearest £ to nearest £ - - - - - - - - - - - - Fund to which asset belongs Cost (optional) - - - - - Fund to which asset belongs Cost (optional) - - - - - - - - - Fund to which liability relates Amount due (optional) - - - - - Print Name Fiona Cooper Daryl Agnew |
Endowment funds to nearest £ |
|---|---|---|---|
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| OK | |||
| Endowment funds to nearest £ |
|||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| Current value (optional) |
|||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| Current value (optional) |
|||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| - | |||
| When due (optional) |
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| Date of approval |
|||
| Fiona Cooper | 5.11.2024 | ||
| Daryl Agnew | 5.11.2024 |
CCXX R2 accounts (SS)
28/01/2025
2