They have been working with children who have neurological conditions for 30 years to allow the youngsters to develop and reach their potential.
The Scottish Centre for Children with Motor Impairments, based at the Craighalbert Centre in Cumbernauld, have also run programmes for parents and relatives to have the confidence to deliver therapy at home and help make a difference to the youngsters in their day to day lives.
Based in Lanarkshire, the centre hosts families from across Scotland many of which rely on the charity’s accommodation facilities for overnight stays while their child is receiving therapy.
Read more: Readers Choice Cash for Charity - everything you need to know
It was an application to the Gannett Foundation, the charitable arm of our parent company, in 2015 that led to a grant award of just over £3000. It helped them to purchase some little home comforts and bedding for the accommodation unit. The charity was able to add small touches that would help make parents and their children’s stay a little more comfortable.
Therapy sessions have been held at the Craighalbert Centre
Alicia McKenzie, business development officer for the charity, said: “We applied for a grant six years ago and we were delighted when we were successful. In the charity sector every grant helps and we are very good at making any donation go a long way.
“We have families who stay with us while their children have therapy sessions with us. If we weren’t able to offer them that facility of having somewhere to stay it would impact on the services that the young people can access so it makes a massive difference for them to be able to stay here. The grant helped us to add the finishing touches and some home comforts.”
As well as offering therapy for youngsters up to the age of 18 with conditions such as cerebral palsy and Rett’s Syndrome, they are also one of Scotland’s grant aided special schools funded directly by the Scottish Government to provide specialist and high quality integrated therapy and education for children and young people affected neurological conditions.
Read more: The Herald's £20,000 boost for charity - tell us who you would nominate
Ms McKenzie added: “During lockdown we did learn to quickly adapt and our therapists began working online with families to offer support. We realised that there were new ways of working with families other than face to face so we began virtual sessions. However, we are also a school so we didn’t close during the pandemic, we kept going as we still had children coming to the centre.”
The charity has a team of highly skilled staff including physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, teachers and early years practitioners.
The centre is also hoping to progress a pilot programme they have been working on, an early intervention programme with children up to the age of three, which could be rolled out across Scotland.
The specialist centre was a previous Gannett Foundation recipient
Our parent company’s charitable arm, The Gannett Foundation, is providing £125,000 in cash to support local charities across the country and we are delighted to have a £20,000 share to give away in our area.
And we want YOU to decide where this money should be spent through our Readers Choice Cash for Charity.
Making a nomination couldn’t be easier – simply log-on to our website and go to heraldscotland.com/readerschoice and fill in your nomination form. You can also write to us, confirming the name and address of the charity you’d like to nominate and why to: Readers’ Choice Cash For Charity Nominations, Newsquest Scotland, 125 Fullarton Drive, Cambuslang, Glasgow, G32 8FG by the closing date of Sunday, October 3 2021.
Once all nominations have been received, our editorial panel will select eight of the most popular local charities to be featured in this year’s grants scheme. We’re then going to put the power to allocate the cash back into the hands of our readers – for four weeks, readers will be invited to collect tokens from our newspapers which can then be sent to collection points across our region or posted. Each token collected will then be used to allocate cash to the nominated charity – so if your favourite charity collects 50% of all to tokens collected, it will receive 50% of the £20,000.
We will be running a readers’ token collect from Monday November 1 to Sunday November 28.
In just over 10 years the Gannett Foundation has made grants totalling nearly £4million in the UK.
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