Alex Reid attended a grants reception hosted by Cambridgeshire Community Foundation and was inspired to set up an endowed fund to help children in care – a much neglected group of society. He established The Outlook Fund to improve the lives of Cambridgeshire children that face difficulty and disadvantage, with a focus on the more than 400 Looked After Children. He has actively encouraged others to give and raised over £450,000 in its first year. To date just over £519,000 has been raised.
Children come into care in tragic circumstances and, sadly, statistics show that they face great difficulties in their lives thereafter. It is a huge credit to the looked after children that many of them triumph over these formidable difficulties to build happy and successful lives. The Outlook Fund is focused on helping more of them to do that.
Often these children are cared for by foster parents or in children’s homes or hostels, lodgings, or residential schools. Money is tight and there is not much spare to pay for extra-curricular activities. What the Outlook Fund money can do is pay for those extra activities and projects that can help disadvantaged children broaden their life experiences, gain self confidence and succeed at school.
The charity organises participation in the Duke of Edinburgh Scheme and the Gateway Award, in which looked after children and other disadvantaged children are under-represented. Fun days, day trips and cultural experiences are arranged: visits to London museums, access to art workshops, visits to country parks and woodland days or even taking part in a summer youth theatre. All these activities and many more, small in themselves, when taken together can improve the lives and life chances of disadvantaged children in Cambridgeshire.
The long term aspiration of the Outlook Fund is to raise an endowment of £1 million, which would produce £50,000 a year for activities and projects. The immediate target was set at £350,000 and within a year had exceeded this and raised £462,594.
“Quite simply without Cambridgeshire Community Foundation it would not have been possible to set up this charity. This was the first time I had done anything like this. All my personal efforts went into fundraising. I didn’t have to get involved in the set up and administration and layers of bureaucracy necessary to establish a charitable trust. I was completely free to concentrate on fundraising for the charity and that is why we have been able to raise the sums we have".
Alex Reid