Grants and Impact Newsletter
Welcome
Welcome to the first edition of our Grants and Impact Newsletter dedicated to showcasing the incredible difference that charitable funding makes across Alder Hey.
This newsletter will focus on the first quarter of the 2025/26 financial year, from 1st April 2025 to 30th June 2025.
This newsletter aims to provide an insight into how grants made by our charity are supporting transformational projects across our hospital community—improving care, experience, and wellbeing for our patients, families, volunteers and staff.
The Grants team at Alder Hey Children’s Charity works closely with colleagues from across the Trust to fund innovative, practical, and compassionate projects. If you have an idea that could benefit from grant support, we’d love to hear from you.
Together, we’re helping to make Alder Hey the very best it can be—for everyone who walks through its doors.
In this issue, you’ll find:
• A breakdown of grant spending in quarter one of 2025/26, across our funding pillars.
• Updates from recently funded projects.
• An overview of the Grants and Impact Team, with signposting to further information about how to apply for charitable funding.
In quarter one of 2025/26 we have…
Received and processed
52 applications Awarded
Valued at £2.1 million
42 Grants
To the value of £1.5 million
We have funded projects across the following charity pillars:
Magic
5 Grants
totalling £252,000
Equipment
6 Grants totalling £984,000
Campus and Community
2 Grants totalling £12,000
Research, Innovation and Education
29 Grants totalling £224,000
Full year grant allocation in 2024/25:
167 Grants approved totalling £4.8 million
MediCinema
A grant of £374,978 from Alder Hey Children’s Charity helped to fund the construction and fit out of our magical Medicinema. Ongoing funding of approximately £99,000 per year will ensure that this amazing new space continues to be one of the hospital’s most exciting patient care tools.
Since becoming fully operational in January 2025, the MediCinema has welcomed 1,855 attendees over six months, offering a unique, immersive experience to 628 inpatients, 17 outpatients, 1,096 family members and friends and 114 members of Alder Hey Trust staff.
A total of 125 screenings were held between January and June 2025, including 20 personal screenings arranged for patients undergoing palliative care — ensuring even the most vulnerable children and families have access to moments of joy and comfort.
The MediCinema is more than just entertainment. It supports patients’ clinical and emotional wellbeing, with benefits including reduced feelings of isolation, improved mood and mental health and support for recovery through therapeutic distraction.
This case study exemplifies how charity grant funding helps fund truly impactful projects —bringing normality, joy and emotional relief to children and families when they need it most.
“I forgot I was in Alder Hey. Whoever came up with this idea is the smartest person in the world.”
Family Wellbeing Hub
Thanks to grant funding of £322,759, Alder Hey has been able to create a bespoke Wellbeing Hub, providing a vital new pathway for families who may need extra support beyond the worldclass care they receive from their clinical teams. Based at the heart of Alder Hey in our main hospital atrium, this resource was created in direct response to research highlighting the financial pressure and wellbeing strain that caring for a child can place on families.
in autumn 2025, Citizen’s Advice Liverpool have supported 79 clients, representing 121 children. They have worked with families who can face multiple and complex challenges, including low income, debt, poor housing, and caring for children with serious and long-term health conditions. During this time Health Junction received 155 referrals.
It uses a social prescribing model to signpost families to support resources within their local communities, empowering them to address the challenges they and their families face.
The Wellbeing Hub has created a one-stop source of support for our families, bringing together Alder Hey’s PALS and Chaplaincy Service, with enhanced support from two new partners Citizen’s Advice Liverpool and Health Junction, a social prescribing provider.
The Wellbeing Hub is a powerful example of how charitable funding is helping to deliver wrap around pastoral support for our families, providing compassion, dignity and practical support when they need it most.
In
a city where 32% of children and families live in poverty, the introduction of the Wellbeing Hub has never been timelier.
Small grant, big impact –a focus on one of our smaller projects
CAMHS Pony ‘connection’ project
Thanks to a small grant of £720 CAMHS was able to pilot a programme of pony ‘connection’ sessions delivered at Beechley Stables in Liverpool. Children and young people who attended were mostly living with chronic social anxiety driven by neurodevelopmental difficulties such as autism spectrum conditions. Our funding provided 24 children and young people with the opportunity to take part. Through participating in activities such as pony grooming, plaiting tails/manes and walking alongside the ponies as they
exercise, these sessions had a huge impact on children and young people who had not been responding to traditional ‘talking therapies’. An added bonus has been the support parents have given to one another, sharing their experiences of living with an autistic chronically anxious child.
One child was brought to the session by her older brother who commented “I can’t remember the last time my sister left the house”. Another child who was not attending school and was showing evidence of selective mutism has now been reintegrated back into school since attending the sessions.
“We are very excited about the way this intervention has impacted so far on young people and particularly attendance, engagement and confidence building.”
Barbara Smith, Alder Hey CAMHS
The Grants and Impact Team are:
For further information about our grant making, please visit the Alder Hey Children’s Charity section of My Alder Hey If you would like to contact us regarding a potential application, please get in touch via email:
grantgivingcharity@alderhey.nhs.uk
