We are ready to ‘Spread Our Wings’ thanks to the National Lottery

Stripey Stork extends its gratitude after being awarded £499,808 in National Lottery funding across three years to support its work helping families across Surrey. The baby bank charity, based in Reigate, will use the money to develop its service that many health and community partners across Surrey have come to depend on to support families facing the effects of poverty.

Stripey Stork has been running since 2013 and is powered by an amazing group of ‘Team Stork’ staff and volunteers. As one of the largest baby banks in the UK, it responds to requests on behalf of over 200 families each week and is seeing a growth in demand for its service that supports families with children from 0-16 years.

Stripey Stork collect donations of new and pre-loved items for babies and children such as cots, prams, highchairs, clothes, toys and toiletries. After making sure items are safe, clean and well presented, they are distributed via a network of referral partners to the families who need them. As well as providing improved outcomes for the children who receive the items, the service supports a circular economy where good quality items are saved from landfill and reused in the community.

The new funding from The National Lottery Community Fund, which distributes money raised by National Lottery players for good causes and is the largest community funder in the UK, will see the charity scale its service. Through a programme of change called ‘Spreading Our Wings’ Stripey Stork will expand its services to help even more families across Surrey and beyond. Over the next three years Stripey Stork aim to almost double their operating capacity and to reach areas of Surrey not currently supported by a baby bank.

Nicola Dawes DL, Founder and Chief Executive says:

We’re delighted that The National Lottery Community Fund has recognised our work in this way. Now, thanks to National Lottery players we will be able to help many more families. To achieve this, we will extend the opening hours of the warehouse creating more opportunities to donate and volunteer. We will also build on the delivery service we recently introduced to distribute items across the county and beyond. This is important because we believe that all children deserve the same start, and with over 23,000 children in Surrey living in poverty our service is needed more than ever.

The National Lottery Community Fund recently launched its new strategy, ‘It starts with community’, which will underpin its efforts to distribute at least £4 billion of National Lottery funding by 2030.

As part of this, the funder has four key missions, which are to support communities to come together, be environmentally sustainable, help children and young people thrive and enable people to live healthier lives.

National Lottery players raise over £30 million a week for good causes across the UK. Thanks to them, last year The National Lottery Community Fund was able to distribute over half a billion pounds (£588.2 million) of life-changing funding to communities. To find out more visit www.TNLCommunityFund.org.uk