2024-12-31-accounts

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Uniformed Charity

Annual Report for the Year Ended 31st December 2024

Charity Information

• Legal Status: Charitable Incorporated Organization (CIO)

• Registered Office: 3rd Floor, 86-90 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4NE

• Contact Number: 07946357413

• Contact Email: [e-mail]

• Website: www.uniformedcharity.org

Trustees

• Farrah Barber – Chair, Co-Director (Appointed: 1st April 2022)

• Alexander Grieve – Member, Co-Director (Appointed: 1st April 2024)

• Gabor Marton – Member (Appointed: 26th May 2022)

• Alexander Brunner – Member (Appointed: 26th May 2022)

• Crystabel Mbagwu – Member (Appointed: 28th October 2022)

Bankers

• Unity Trust Bank

PO Box 7193

Planetary Road, Willenhall, WV19DG

Trustees’ Report for the Year Ended 31st December 2024

Objectives & Activities

The trustees review the aims, objectives, and activities of the charity annually. In line with the guidance provided by the Charity Commission, the trustees ensure that all planned activities align with our core mission:

Uniformed Charity

Uniformed is a charity dedicated to reducing all unnecessary barriers to entry to education for children in the UK, starting with school uniforms.

Achievements & Performance

2024 was another significant year for Uniformed, as we continued to build on our mission and have significantly expanded our presence across the country and the number of families we are able to serve.

Charity Structure & Governance

• Alexander Grieve was appointed as a Trustee and as the co-leader of Uniformed, as recognition of his long-term commitment to the charity and its goals.

• We welcomed an additional team member, Harriet Crosley, to support our Social Media and Communications team. She brings a wealth of experience from the marketing sector and has been able to level up our online presence.

• We introduced a new workstream to the charity, Inspire. Inspire is designed to coordinate workshops for students that cover important life-skills, i.e financial literacy, confidence building, etc., to further reduce the educational attainment gap for pupils from poorer socio-economic backgrounds.

• We continue to have a core working team of ~10 volunteers who cover Partnerships, Social Media & Communications, Fundraising, Voucher Provision, Finances, and Uniformed Inspire. A handful of team members are transitioning to support the charity in an advisory capacity.

• The team meets biweekly, with regular daily communication via WhatsApp.

• Our governance structure ensures oversight and efficient decision-making, allowing us to maximise impact with minimal overhead costs to ensure the vast majority of the funds we raise go towards helping families up and down the country.

Key Team Members

1. Founder & Co-Director: Farrah Barber

Uniformed Charity

• Experience including in management consulting (McKinsey & Co.), data & tech governance (UN), and software engineering (Goldman Sachs).

• Co-Director & Head of Fundraising: Alex Grieve

• Past experience including in digital consulting at McKinsey & Company and Allen & Overy.

• Former Junior Product Manager at a fintech.

• Voucher Fund Director: Parco Cheng

• Experienced primary school teacher and charity volunteer.

• Develops tailored implementation strategies for school partnerships.

4. Treasurer: Crystabel Ikechi Mbagwu, ACCA.

5. Co-Director, Digital Strategy: Alex Brunner

6. Co-Director, Digital Strategy: Harriet Crosley

7. Partnerships and Inspire Lead: Bonna Kabir

Additional members contribute to research, social media, website management, and financial oversight.

Important financial considerations

It is worth noting that 2024 was a notably bad year for grant fundraising, as has been reported across the entire charity sector. In order to ensure that Uniformed was able to continue to support our families and charity partners, we had to begin rationing the vouchers that we could provide to ensure that we were able to support those most in need. This means that our voucher provisioning was reduced, with plans to increase roll-out once we had raised additional funds. We have a 2025 execution strategy to increase output, which will commence in Q2 2025.

Key Partnerships in 2024

At Uniformed, we have a range of partnerships. These aim to fulfill our mission to reduce the educational attainment gap for disadvantaged socio-economic families through providing high quality school uniforms free of charge and opening up new opportunities to students through our Inspire channel. Partnerships can stretch from regular donations of a fixed

Uniformed Charity

amount of clothing, through to providing ad hoc support if and when needed and advertising our services in the local community.

We are seeking to grow our partnerships to create a network of groups across the UK that are committed to distributing uniforms to those in need. This can be through Uniformed directing surplus uniforms to partners in-person, or through distributing our vouchers to families. We have started to connect with baby bank networks across the country to enable this along with existing partnerships with groups that work with marginalised groups such as Care4Calais and Croydon Refugee Centre.

Schools

Through the Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) we partner with, we are able to partner with over 50 schools across Stoke-on-Trent, London and the South-East. In Stoke we have partnered with Alpha Academy and Glebe Academy, and in London and in the South-East with The Kemnal Academies Trust (TKAT). The MATs connect to schools in their network in the most disadvantaged areas they serve and from there we work with dedicated members of staff to purchase school uniforms and distribute directly to families.

Charities

Alongside partnering with schools to distribute our uniforms, we also have partnerships with two charities supporting refugee families, Croydon Refugee Centre and Care4Calais. We have actively sought these partnerships to expand our reach and support more vulnerable and underrepresented groups across the country who require support.

Uniform Supplier

We currently work with Price & Buckland, whereby they provide Uniformed with vouchers worth £50, which we pay £30 for at cost, so they make no profit on the uniforms sold through these vouchers. This has been our only school uniform partnership to-date, however, we are looking to expand the range of uniform suppliers we work with to hopefully bring on larger national providers such as F&F, George and Tu. We are also looking for a school shoe partner who could supply Uniformed with new school shoes. This is because many of the beneficiaries and charities and schools we partner with have all asked if we provide school shoes, as that is one item desperately needed by families, demonstrating a large demand for this service.

Uniformed Charity

Partner Schools (non-exhaustive)

• Tangmere Primary Academy

• Salmestone Academy

• Dame Janet Primary

• Newlands Primary

• Northdown Primary

• Draper Mills Academy

• Shenstone Academy

• Orchards Primary

• East Wickham Academy

• Glebe Academy

• Discovery Academy

Other Partners (non-exhaustive)

• Little Village

• Croydon Refugee Day Centre

• Gordon Rural Action

• Little Stars Charity

• The SPACE Team

• Baby Bank Network

• Kids Bank Chester

• Spark Burntwood

• Sebby's Corner

• Family 2 Family

• Baby Bank Alliance

• Clothing Coventry

• Faces Bedford

• Harwich Hive

• Little Village HQ

• Migrant Help

Uniform Fund (formerly our Hardship Fund)

Uniformed Charity

Our Uniform Fund provides vouchers directly to families outside partner schools, particularly asylum seekers and refugees, to expand our reach across the country. This year we have transitioned to providing uniform support on an ad-hoc basis as our central form of support beyond just working with individual schools/partners alone.

While we continue to work with our school and charity partners, we have evolved the relationships to focus more on advertising for our services where families can directly reach us. We have evolved our approach due to higher redemption rates seen in families who directly reach out to us. We also receive inbound through our website on a weekly basis.

Voucher Provision & Impact

• Total Vouchers Issued: ~800

• Total Vouchers Redeemed: ~600

New Operating Model

• Transitioned from parent-claimed vouchers to a bulk-ordering model for schools and as demanded charity partner and family support , addressing challenges such as:

• Limited technology access

• Language barriers

• Lack of bank accounts/permanent addresses

• Parental disengagement

• Schools now manage distribution, ensuring higher utilisation and better support for students within our school distribution channel

Uniform Provider & Supply Chain Management

• 2024 Supplier: Price & Buckland

Uniformed Charity

• Future Plans:

• Exploring new suppliers to mitigate supply chain risks and reduce costs.

• Investing in new partnerships to enable aid in the distribution of school uniform from small organisations who currently offer school uniform support.

Operating Model:

1. Raise funds from grants and donors.

2. Purchase vouchers (£30 cost, £50 value for families).

3. Distribute vouchers via schools and hardship funds.

4. Direct invoice payment to suppliers.

Financial Review

Income & Funding Sources

• Total Income: £9771

• Grants: £8,000

  • £3000 from Garfield Weston Foundation in June 2024

■ £5000 from Toy Trust in Oct 2024.

• Individual Donations: £88

• Corporate Donations: £1,682

■ £433 (600 corporate donation from CAA (Creative Arts Agency) Feb

2024

■ £1000 from Tracelink SA Oct 2024

■ £250 from Siemens Oct 2024

During the year, we obtained donations from Tracelink SA to fund uniform vouchers for Wraysbury school through School direct . This was successfully executed during the year. We also obtained a grant from Garfield Weston Foundation to further our objectives. A portion of the funding received (£1,500) has been used to purchase uniform vouchers under the period in review.

Expenditure

Uniformed Charity

• Voucher Provision: £6,220

• Operational Costs: £386 (including cloud hosting, website maintenance, and bank fees)

Reserves & Sustainability

Reserves policy

Our policy is to maintain an operating reserve account and sufficient cash balances to ensure the stability of the charity and day-to-day operations. The operating reserve is intended to provide an internal source of funds for situations such as an unanticipated decline in fundraising. There are no staff costs or contractual commitments to suppliers.

• Operating Reserves: £1,200 (6 months operational coverage)

Future Fundraising Goals:

• Raise an additional £20,000 for the 2024/25 academic year.

• Provide uniforms for ~ 330 more students .

Strategic Goals for 2025 & Beyond

Short-Term Goals (2025-2026)

• Expand geographical reach to support additional schools and charity partners

• At least an additional 10 charity partners supported

• Build partnerships with corporate entities, politicians, and communities

• Increase voucher support:

• Increase voucher value to £75

• 450 additional vouchers issued

• Increase social media profile

• Reach 1,500+ followers across our social media platforms

• Fundraising

• An additional £20,000 raised

Uniformed Charity

In terms of how we manage our funds raised, our goal is to spend as much of the funds raised to purchase uniform vouchers and help as many students as possible. However, we also do keep funds in reserve from one fundraising round to the next, to have a buffer of funds we can use for the next round if we are able to raise enough funds for our cause.

In addition to this, in launching our new service, Inspire, focused on an event and workshop branch to the charity, one of the aims of this is to continue to allow us to provide a service to the communities we work in even if we are unable to fund voucher provision for a time. This enables us to further build the resilience and sustainability of the charity’s model.

Thus, our overall targets:

• Support 1,000 families by January 2026

• Uniformed Inspire: Launch new service focusing on events and workshops to advise pupils on universities and careers

• Build 70 partnerships across the UK to maximise our distribution and coverage

• Reach fundraising goal of £60,000 by the end of 2025

• Increase our social media presence to 1,500+ people

Impact & Testimonials

Driving Statistics:

• 90% of high schools and 80% of primary schools in the UK require uniforms.

• School uniform costs have risen to ~£420 per student annually.

• Over 500,000 children are excluded each year due to incorrect uniform (Children's Society's report 'The Wrong Blazer 2020')

• 43% of families say uniform costs have negatively impacted them.

Testimonials from Beneficiaries:

• "This is a very happy moment for us as we received the uniforms. The quality is amazing, and we are so grateful for this support."

Uniformed Charity

• "A father called in tears, thanking us because his son can now return to school in September with proper uniform."

• "This will be a great help for my daughter's education, and I am truly grateful."

• “I just wanted to touch base to let you know we are receiving some incredible feedback from the families that we have referred to you for uniform support.”

Governance & Management

• Uniformed operates as a CIO , registered since May 26, 2022.

• Trustees oversee operations and financial management.

• – all trustees and team members are volunteers.

• No staff salaries or contractor costs

Remuneration Policy

• No personnel receive salaries.

• All work is voluntary, with minimal expense reimbursements.

Declaration

The trustees declare that they have approved this report.

Signed on behalf of the Board of Trustees:

Farrah Barber – Founder, Chair of Trustees

Date: 29/04/2025

Uniformed Charity

Alexander Grieve - Co-Director

Date: 31st December 2024

Uniformed Charity

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