After eight years of funding from the BBC charity, it was pulled in 2024, leaving local children and their families at risk of losing their much-needed support and the charity on a hunt to find new sources of income.
But the funding has now been reinstated for the next three years.
‘We are delighted that we have been successful in our funding application to Children in Need and that we will now be able to offer further targeted support to children experiencing difficulties in these areas,’ said Autism Guernsey chairman Andrew Warren.
The charity costs close to £450,000 to run each year.
When the Children in Need funding was stopped, fundraisers were set up and Health & Social Care provided an immediate one-off payment of £65,000 to maintain key services throughout 2025.
In April this year, it was announced that Autism Guernsey and HSC had entered a three-year partnership to support the charity’s learning courses.
Mr Warren said that the States funding was not related to previous Children in Need funding.
HSC contributions fund places on parenting courses, whereas Children in Need only funds groups with a direct impact on children.
‘We receive about £23,000 from the States, so less than 5% of our total fund. Children in Need are funding us £100,000 for three years, so £33,000 a year is about 7% of our annual budget, and the rest we have to generate ourselves,’ Mr Warren said.
‘A lot of it comes from various grant-making bodies, such as the Lloyds Foundation or the Guernsey Community Foundation or Social Investment Fund. The remainder we have to generate either through small individual donations or fundraising activities.
The group activities that Children in Need previously funded are now being funded by other sources, which allows the new funding to go towards a new project.
A part-time member of staff has been employed to deliver the project, which will provide more small group and one-to-one support focusing on mental and emotional wellbeing and interoception.
‘Interoception is the process of your brain interpreting signals it gets from the body, such as hunger, pain or anxiety,’ said Mr Warren.
‘Autistic people are more likely to have difficulties with that than neurotypical people. There are two places those difficulties might arise. The first is interpreting the message, if feeling hungry, the brain will get the message, but may not be able to actually interpret what that means. The second is recognising hunger, but not being able to translate that into going to eat something.’
The project will have a 20-strong cohort for each year of the funding and a new group of children will be identified each year.
Mr Warren said the Children in Need criteria this year was specific which benefitted the charity and the work it wanted to do.
‘There is strong evidence that this type of intervention can improve autistic children’s wellbeing as well as having beneficial knock-on effects on parents, carers and siblings,’ he said.
‘It will open up life to people, reduce the amount of school refusal, enable them to take part in activities.’
The demand for Autism Guernsey outweighs what it can provide.
Mr Warren said the charity supports about 200 people, but that number could easily be 1,000.Where grant-givers provide funding, it has to be for the specific delivery of something, so many charities continue to struggle with rent and general running costs, he added.
‘While we are delighted to have received this funding, it in no way fulfils all our needs, demand for our services currently significantly outweighs our capacity and the need for our services locally continues to grow,’ he said.
‘It costs more than £400,000 to run Autism Guernsey and we welcome continued support from all areas of the community.’
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