Thank you for taking the time to visit my page. DSL was set up as a volunatary organisation in 1998 by a highly enterprising group of parents in Peckham whose children lacked any real access to speech and language therapy in their borough. Today, we have charitable status and provides a vital service to more than thirty five children and their families from across South London, providing weekly intensive speech occupational and physiotherapy to the children and educating their parents/carers how to help progress the speech and language development of children with Down's Syndrome further. DSL pays specialist therapists to provide this, funding it entirely from donations and funds raised by parents. As you can imagine, the children come from families with a wide range of circumstances – inevitably those from the least advantaged backgrounds need this support the most and have the lowest propensity to afford any self-funded therapies or raise the required funding.

The last 12 months have been exceptional for DSL. As in 2009, 2010 saw us raise just over £100,000: those of you who participated in last year’s golf day and so generously bid for auction lots were prime contributors as total donations were over £20,000!

  

Our success at fundraising in the last few years has benefited members as never before: we now provide a full suite of speech, occupational and physio therapy that is unrivalled in its quality and, even mroe so now, remains unavailable to all but those very wealthy few who have the disposable income to fund it themselves. We have also started a programme of parental support groups, hosting parents of current and former patients to discuss all manner of aspects of developmental opportunities, school relationships, mentoring and general emotional support. These have been warmly received and we are looking to see what scope there is to extend the programme in the coming 12 months.

 

I am delighted to report that the upgraded therapy service we launched at the end of September last year has bedded down even better than we dared hope. Children are now receiving personalised treatement, in both individual and group sessions and we are able to give them a breadth and depth of input that is significantly greater than previously ever achieved. More than that, we have also been able to make great inroads into our waiting list, inviting six new families to join. We have also been actively contacting local referers (GPs, child development consultants, etc) to encourage more people to contact us.

 

The coming 12 months promise more development objectives for the trustees - given that we do not have to devote as much time to management of service delivery we have more capacity to consider wider fundraising programmes that will help us to achieve the much needed programme extensions into areas such as providing legal support to families as they go through the traumatic process of getting the first Statutory Statement of Educational Needs for their children - the legal agreement with the local authority that governs the child's support and care package. Again, those from the least advantaged backgrounds tend to get the worst outcomes and do not have the means to seek legal advice. We are also going to launch a website, with one of its objectives being to consolidate leading practice and support resources for parents.

 

In the current environment I am acutely conscious that everybody is taking more care with how they invest their charitable donations, so some details for you as to where your money is spent. Every £3,500 that we can raise will provide a free total therapy care package for a local child that is: (i) unavailable anywhere else in the country; (ii) provided to children from the age of three months - starting this young has a real impact on future speech development as does, amazingly, the impact of OT and PT; (iii) in great demand, as witnessed by DSL's long waiting list; and (iv) accessible in particular by those in society who are less fortunate socio-economically and who need such support, perhaps, more than any other group of our members.

 

Thank you for your donation.