Aviva Community Fund has provided £5,198 of match funding
Supporting families in neonatal care
Basildon, England, United Kingdom
Aim
Our project is aimed to alleviate the mental stresses of being in a neonatal or paediatric unit with a sick child.
Hi, I'm Ashley.
After 4 rounds of IVF I finally got pregnant and was expecting twins! At just 24 weeks I went into spontaneous labour and immediately assumed the worse. After a 12 and a half hour labour with just gas and air our first born, Esme, was born sleeping weighing just 670g but still perfectly formed and beautiful. Our second daughter was born 50 minutes later. Isla was just 655g and just as beautiful and perfect as her sister.
From that day she has fought hard to show and teach us our purpose in life! To give back to others!
Thanks to Isla’s strength and courage we have dedicated our lives to helping those that helped us through our darkest days.
When Isla was first transferred to the Royal London Hospital we had lots of family and friends asking how she was doing and we found it hard to reply to everyone. Isla's Journey- this not only documents her daily adventures and milestones but also our aspirations to help others.
The charity will also raise money so that we can provide care packages to families with babies and children in hospital. We have since grown and provide multiple resources to units to help combat some of the stresses families have on unit. Our latest project is to provide libraries to family rooms in NICU- this has been piloted in the Royal London and proved extremely successful- hence our desire to extend to other hospitals.
Literacy is a key skill to help development, in particular with neonatal babies who start their lives early. Reading as a family helps create a bond between parent and child which can feel somewhat absent with their child being in an incubator.
We hope you will help support this project.
This project successfully funded on 16th June 2021