Big news! We've been awarded our first ever piece of multi-year funding: three years of support from Postcode Local Trust, who have now backed us twice.
This is our first ever piece of multi-year funding. If you've worked in or alongside a small non-profit, you'll know what a big deal that is. Postcode Local Trust is supporting our work for the next three years, with funds raised by Postcode Lottery players (formerly People's Postcode Lottery).
It's also the second time the trust has backed us. Last year, a one-off grant from them helped us pilot our whole school programme in Plymouth. That feels like a huge endorsement of our work, and we're allowing ourselves a little moment to be proud of that.
From the school gates to the community
The Body Happy Schools Programme is the UK’s first whole-school body respect programme. We work with the whole school community over time: training for staff, workshops for students, support for parents and carers, and a peer advocacy programme that puts young people at the heart of the project aims - to build classroom cultures of body respect.
In Plymouth, the young people well and truly took the lead. Our Year 10 peer advocates co-facilitated workshops for younger students, led tutor sessions, made posters and designed assemblies. They designed and launched their own anti-bullying intervention, the Bullying box, and their voices helped prompt a review of the school’s uniform policy. One of them told us early on that they would never speak in public. They were happy to design slides, but they weren’t doing any of the talking. By the end of the programme, they were helping to lead workshops for Years 7, 8 and 9. Then they and one other peer advocate came with us to Westminster to speak at the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Eating Disorders round table on education.
At the end of the school programme, the young people told us something we couldn’t ignore: they wanted to take this work beyond the school gates.
That’s how Body Happy Belonging, our community programme in Plymouth, began. It’s intergenerational, so you’ll find everyone from toddlers to older volunteers, parents and carers in the room together. Children’s body image is shaped at home and in their communities as well as in the classroom, so that’s where the work happens too.
Our work in Plymouth is rooted in PL5, in the north of the city. It’s shaped by the people who live there: the young people who asked for it, and the families and volunteers who come along and make it what it is.
We choose to work where support for this kind of prevention has been hardest to come by. Body image is connected to everything else going on in children’s lives. Pressures like the cost of living and food insecurity shape how children relate to food and to their bodies. Prevention should reach every community, whatever its resources.
Why three years matters so much
Here’s something people outside the non-profit world don’t always see. Most funding is short-term, and much of it is tied to a single project. So you work project to project, plan a year at a time, and start the next application almost as soon as a grant lands.
Culture change takes time and relationships, and it means coming back to the work again and again.
Three years means we can plan beyond the next deadline and invest in the core foundations that every project needs in order to run. In the last five years, we’ve reached over 50,000 children and young people and worked directly with more than 120 schools. This funding will help us reach thousands more, and give us a strong base to grow from.
Being upfront about what this costs
The award is £48,759 over three years. We're sharing that because we think it matters to be open about money in the non-profit world. It's something we find ourselves explaining again and again. This grant is one part of how our work is funded. It sits alongside our local authority partnerships, work commissioned by schools, other grants, and the generosity of people who donate, fundraise for us or buy our resources. Every one of those contributions matters to us.
There's so much that goes into this work beyond the sessions themselves: impact evaluation, resource development, team development, training, compliance and policy work, partnerships, communications and fundraising. That's skilled, full-time work. Then there's all the important but less photogenic stuff that keeps everything running, like insurance, web hosting, our booking system and our CRM. All of it has to be paid for.
From the outside, it isn't always easy to see how much work like ours relies on skilled, paid people, and proper frameworks to make everything run safely and smoothly. Being able to pay people fairly means this work is open to anyone with the right skills and experience, not only those who can afford to give their time for free. Funding like this is an investment in the people, the foundations and the framework, that make the work possible.
Thank you
To every Postcode Lottery player: thank you. And thank you to Postcode Local Trust for backing us, twice.
Funds raised by Postcode Lottery players and awarded by Postcode Local Trust.
