Butterflies Club Lifeskills Building Blocks

Who are we?

Butterflies Clubs has been providing clubs and activities for children and young people across Essex since 2018. We provide personalised activity plans to ensure we are meeting the needs and interests of each child. We aim to provide opportunities for children and young people with disabilities equal to those experienced by their peers, breaking down the barriers and ensuring they have exciting activities and social experiences throughout their childhood.

Community impact

We provide a wraparound service for families of children and young people with disabilities by providing respite for families whist their children engage in exciting activities, parent/carer coffee mornings, siblings activities and experiences for the whole family to enjoy together.

A lot of our activities with the children and young people take place in the community, this assists in both the children becoming confident in the community and the local community facilities learning ways to become more inclusive and comfortable for those with disabilities

Why are we crowdfunding?

We are fundraising to develop a new lifeskills program for the children and young people to take part in life skills sessions to help them learn skills to benefit their adult life.

Due to the wide range of needs each child will have their own targets to work on. For some children this will be to have a caravan break where they are supported by Butterflies staff and away from their primary caregiver, where they can work on skills like making their breakfast, getting themselves ready for the day and accessing community activities in a new area. For other children this will be to access physical activities they enjoy in their local community such as swimming, basketball courts, bowling, golf and other activities which will help keep them moving and getting exercise. 

We need to raise money as the level of need for the activities ran by the organisation is very high and constantly increasing, also inflation has increased the costs of running the activities. Our organisation has to grow to begin to meet the need, however we are finding more and more families in devastating financial situations and unable to afford activities for their children as they are struggling with the cost of day to day expenses. 

How we’ll spend the money raised

We will be spending the money to regularly spend time with families to discuss potential targets and review progress on previous targets for the child to work on eg to regularly access a swim session or to have an overnight stay, make a healthy breakfast and to take part in a 30 minute beach walk during the evening and again in the morning.

Each child/young person’s target will be relating to their own interests and aspirations, whilst also promoting a healthy and active lifestyle.

The costs associated with this are

• Activity costs eg swim session/ caravan cost or similar. 
• Staffing costs
• Transport costs
• Individual funding for specific children whose families are in very challenging financial circumstances.

How you can play your part

There are four simple ways to help us reach our target, and make this project a reality.

1. Make a pledge. Don’t delay if you’re going to support us because momentum is key to our success!

2. Spread the word. Share our project on your social media pages and tell the world to get behind us! The more people we reach, the more support we will get.

3. Offer rewards. Get involved if you are a local business by donating things we can offer to our supporters. We will give you a shout out!

4. If you want to run your own fundraiser to support us, maybe a sponsored activity or similar, use the 'contact project' button at the top of our page to let us know. Setting up your own page only takes a few minutes and you won’t need any bank details. Just a fun idea!