We are so grateful to all our supporters - the families we work with, our grant funders, our social media fans, and HUGE thanks to our employee team, our trustees, our Advisory Teachers and our volunteers - you are all WONDERFUL!
A quick summary of DS Achieve’s achievements in 2022:
our Little Achievers pre-school programme, funded by The National Lottery and delivered by Hannah, Sandra, Rachael and our volunteer Fin (who left in autumn), supported 17 families over the year.
our Young Achievers programme for school-age children and young people, funded by Children in Need and delivered by Avril (now on mat leave), Jo, Zohra (who left in July), Charlotte N and Charlotte L plus a sizeable volunteer team, have worked with 29 different children with most children returning each term.
98 bookings onto our training events during 2022, which included Number Sense, DSEI Reading and Language Intervention,, Transition to Special School & Transport, Supporting Children with Down Syndrome in Education and Visual Development. Thank you to Helen Long, Gillian W-T, Anne Gullick and Dr Maggie Woodhouse in delivering these courses on our behalf.
our new service, Resource Packs into School, supported 14 different children in 2022! This combines bespoke Specialist Down Syndrome Advisory Teacher advice to schools and nurseries combined with the delivery of a practical resource to help teachers better support individual children with Down Syndrome specific aspects of their learning.
our Empowerment Group combined two social events (Pots of Art and an ‘Ultimate Night-in’ fashion evening) which were attended by 19 parents, with a programme of Facebook Lives which were viewed approx. 400 times over the year.
We rounded off all things social with a fantastic pre-Christmas party for the whole family and had 20 families attend.
In addition to events, we have had great success with raising awareness, sharing knowledge, information and positivity throughout the year. We’ve issued 12 newsletters to 194 parents and professionals, kept busy on social media and now have 588 followers of our Facebook page, 201 parent carers in our Facebook community group, and kept the website up to date which is now receiving an average of 470 unique visitors each month. We’ve also attended some community events to spread the word about DS Achieve and all the services we provide, increasing awareness and building relationships locally.
At the end of the year, we launched our partnership with Hertfordshire Libraries to create volunteering opportunities for young people with Down Syndrome. Watch this space for more info as this project develops!
THANK YOU all for your support, hard work, funding, cheerleading, Facebook ‘likes’ and general love. We are very grateful and we are looking forward to carrying on delivering these services to you in 2023.