The Children's Respite Trust

The Children's Respite Trust is a registered charity that supports children with disabilities and their families by helping them to get a break throughout Sussex, Surrey and Kent

The respite stays, or short breaks as some people call them, are provided in privately run centres, which are carefully vetted and selected together with the families. We fundraise and pay for the stays, always aiming to get a good charitable rate of course.

The support we provide to the families begins and ends with our Caseworkers, dedicated individuals with a variety of backgrounds. Some have experience of the legal field and are able to assist with building a case for support to put to local authorities when a family deserves more help. Others come from a child-care or social services background and all are Criminal Records Bureau checked and undergo extensive training.

This casework is an essential first step for us, as we do not want to replicate the work provided by statutory services or worse still relieve them of their responsibilities to these children and their families.

The charity operates from from East Hoathly in East Sussex and is largely run by volunteers with minimal staff input, which means we manage to keep our costs very low. Vital to all of our work is fundraising, as we are only limited in the number of families we can help by the amount of money we raise.