The 6th February marks the start of Children’s Mental Health Week across the UK.
Children’s Mental Health Week encourages families, schools and communities to come together and put a spotlight on the importance of mental health in young people.
It’s amazing to have a dedicated week to help raise awareness of the mental health challenges that many of our children face.
But the reality is that children need ongoing support to ensure they don’t have to face mental health problems alone.
Luckily, there are a lot of national and local charities that provide ongoing support for the mental health of young people.
One example is Leicester based Little Beam and their newly formed Little Beam Foundation
Little Beam: Supporting the mental health of children through short stories
Little Beam produce short story books for primary school children that help them navigate through some of life’s challenges.
Their titles introduce some amazing characters like Alan and Anna Anxiety, Isla the Unicorn and Mindfulness Mike.
The adventures of the characters provide an engaging and effective way for parents and carers to discuss concepts like emotional and mental wellbeing with young children.
Little Beam was founded in 2018 when Tracey Lawrence and Kerry Hearsey realised they shared a vision for helping young children overcome difficult issues and manage their mental health.
Their Little Beam series of books have been hugely popular online and are also available at selected stockists across Leicestershire
The Little Beam Foundation: Taking the vision further
After seeing the difference that their books had made in the lives of so many young children, Tracey and Kerry decided they wanted to take their vision further.
In 2022 they launched The Little Beam Foundation.
The Foundation helps children and young adults that are struggling with mental health issues by providing access and grants to the support they need.
Through collaborations with other organisations and local businesses, The Little Beam Foundation are able to offer children with a way to access mental health support through the mediums of art, sport, education and music.
The importance of awareness and promotion for small and newly formed charities
Effective promotion is important for charities.
Raising awareness helps charities reach the people they want to support and lets them know that there is help available.
Promotion is also important for aiding fundraising efforts and attracting new volunteers and supporters.
But a lot of small or newly formed charities don’t have the funds to raise awareness through promotion.
That’s where we can help.
As the social responsibility and community support arm of Everything Branded, Everything Community are privileged to support many small and newly formed charities with their promotional needs.
A request for support from The Little Beam Foundation
We were delighted to receive a message from Tracey Lawrence on LinkedIn, which gave a really great insight into The Little Beam Foundation and the great work they do.
We were excited to find out more about the charity and how we could help.
Tracey explained that the Foundation was interested in promotional merchandise to help raise awareness, and asked if we might be able to make a donation.
As well as raising awareness, Tracey explained that the merchandise should also help to provide the children the Foundation supports a sense of community and togetherness.
We put our heads together and thought of suitable promotional items that would be visible enough to raise awareness but would also provide children with a sense of belonging.
We combined a list of possibilities and Tracey narrowed it down to three, resulting in Everything Branded donating 500 branded wrist snaps, 250 pens and 25 notepads.
The EB team got straight to work!
A heartfelt thankyou
More about Everything Community
Everything Community manages the social responsibility and community support initiatives of Everything Global.
If you’re a registered charity and want to talk about how we can potentially work together, we’d love to hear from you at hello@everythingcommunity.org
We’re keen on helping all charities and community causes where we can, but we prioritise requests from smaller charities and those that are local to the Leicester area.
