Support Dogs is a charity providing life-changing assistance dogs for children and adults living with some of the most challenging medical conditions. We run three pioneering programmes: Autism Assistance Dogs, Epilepsy Seizure Alert Dogs and Disability Assistance Dogs.
Autism Assistance Dogs: Our dogs support autistic children by increasing safety, reducing anxiety in social environments, and helping them navigate key developmental stages.
Epilepsy Seizure Alert Dogs: We are the UK’s first and only charity to train seizure alert dogs. These dogs provide a 100% reliable warning before an epileptic seizure, giving clients essential time to find safety, reduce risk of injury, and retain control over their condition.
Disability Assistance Dogs: Our disability assistance programme provides continuous, practical support for individuals with long-term physical conditions including Multiple Sclerosis and Cerebral Palsy. The dogs assist with a wide range of daily tasks, promoting confidence, and improved wellbeing.
The demand for our charity’s services is overwhelming and continues to grow at an alarming rate. With the continued pressure on the NHS and the health and social care sector we expect these numbers to increase again. In the last 12 months alone, more than 29,000 families and individuals accessed our application pages seeking help, while our services team provided direct advice, guidance, and support to a further 4,000 people through our education projects and workshops. Yet this represents only a small fraction of those who could benefit from our work.
As a charity, we are determined to help as many families as we possibly can but to carry out this unique work we need to increase our revenue.
We work to ensure our charity is flexible in its income and not over reliant anyone source. A third comes from trusts and third from legacies while the rest is through a combination of individual funding, fundraising events and corporate sponsorship. As we strive to grow, we need to ensure our revenue grows in advance to meet the increase in service provision. That includes increase income from existing streams but also identify new streams such as government funding and earned income from enterprise such as a shop or leasing parts of our building for room hire by other local organisations.
The funding from The Pixel Fund to help with our revenue generation will help our charity to not only grow our services but help us to create plans for sustainable income generation.