A National Voice

Funding for A National Voice

Please contact us if you would like to donate or help us to fundraise.

Currently A National Voice is funded through a Department For Education and Skills (previously DoH) Section 64 Grant. This money allows us to pay staff and operate offices in London and Manchester. We also use this money for general running costs, a management fee (to our 'host' organisation) and to pay for our members to attend regular meetings (hotel and travel costs). It remains the longer term aim of A National Voice to become ultimately an independent organisation. Currently we are hosted by The Prince's Trust whose role is to manage our funding and administaration and provide mentoring support.

There are approximately 58,000 children and young people in Care in England and each one of these is automatically a member of A National Voice. In reality the majority of these children and young people from care have not heard of us, as we are still a very young organisation (launched in summer 1999).

Since A National Voice began we estimate that we have made contact with more than 1000 young people. Often the only way we can make contact with new members is via Local Authority In/After Care groups. This means we need to rely on workers to tell young people about us.

A National Voice always tries to ensure that our members do not incur any costs while attending our meetings, however we may make a charge when working with professionals or professional agencies.

It is our aim to have office bases in all nine regions of Engalnd and to employ more Regional Development Workers so as to provide a real local and national platform to hear the voices of young people from care. Obviously this is a long way off and will require considerable forward planning and fundraising. A National Voice does receive some small service income from things like:

• Commissioned pieces of consultation work
• Public speaking
• Publications/reports

The amount we receive for the above is minimal and it is vital that we secure other sources of core funding to exist and grow in the future. A National Voice intends to gain full independent charity status in the future and we take this prospect seriously.

It is our intention to identify and secure future funding in order to grow in staff numbers and increase our geographical presence across the whole of England.