Community – Our local Paddock School receives a grant February 2021 – £1,000 for Musical Instruments…

Paddock School - local SEND school - PRC donated £1,000 funding for musical instruments

How playing a musical instrument benefits your brain…

This is one of the reasons why we chose to help Paddock School with a grant for Musical Instruments… it’s vital for children’s brain development because it recruits almost every part of the brain those areas that process sound, memory, movement and vision.

The Challenge

Putney Rotary Club’s focus in the year 2020-2021 is on disadvantaged youth in our community.

We want to empower those less fortunate than ourselves to have the right tools and opportunities to succeed.

London District 1130 District Grant

Clubs across the world contribute to our Rotary Foundation charity. This money is invested, and every 3 years, money comes back to Districts in the form of District and Global Grant monies, available for projects that meet specific criteria.

All clubs across London were asked to submit applications for a District Grant up to the value of £1,000 for suitable projects that would meet the match funding criteria.

Rotary Foundation District Grants are block grants made to districts to support smaller projects, both locally and internationally. Districts may use up to 50 percent of their available District Designated Fund (DDF) for these grants in a given Rotary year and administer the grant without the Foundation’s involvement.

Our Putney Rotary Club decided to ask SEND schools in Wandsworth to apply for a £1,000 grant. Based on their application, we would choose a schools to support, and then raise funds for our half of the donation to our chosen project.

Paddock School came up with a wonderful application to provide musical instruments to their kids. A new Music teacher has been employed, so this was the perfect opportunity to help them with additional funding.

They are a caring special school with expertise in a range of specialist strategies including TEACCH, PECS, Attention Autism, Makaton and Intensive Interaction. Also benefiting from a multi- professional team including onsite Speech and Language Therapists and Occupational Therapists, high levels of CAMHS and Educational Psychology support and close links with the social workers from the Wandsworth 0-25 service. They are also a Level 2 UNICEF Rights Respecting School.

We applied for a London District 1130 grant to match fund our club contribution of £500, and we were delighted to be awarded the District Grant.

The Solution

Putney Rotary member, Pauline, who led the campaign, came up with a fun Rock Your Sock fundraiser where our members wore funky socks to our club meeting and made a small contribution. This began our fundraising for our £500, in order to get matching funding of £500 from District 1130.

In addition, we decided to contribute the funds raised at our Christmas Meal event on the 7th December 2020. For the first time ever, we had an online SpinningWheel raffle with loads of winners, whilst raising funds for musical instruments for our local Paddock School.

District 1130 Grant Approval

We were delighted that our application was approved, so together with our fundraising efforts, we were able to present a cheque of £1,000 to Paddock School to purchase musical instruments for their music department.

Paddock School Executive Headteacher – Sarah Santos (RHS) and Kyproulla Markou – Music Teacher (LHS)

Paddock School receives their £1,000 grant for musical instruments from Putney Rotary

With special thanks to:

Putney Rotarian, Pauline , for co-ordinating applications from SEND schools in our local community for the District Grant, and liaising with our winner, Paddock School.
Paddock School Business and Operations Manager, Gary Fogg for co-ordinating with Pauline on the application for us.
Ros Morris on the London District Foundation team, co-ordinating the District 1130 Foundation Grants.

The Rotary Foundation is our own charity, and it’s one of the top 10 contributors to the World Health Organisation. Ending Polio throughout the world has been an ongoing project for Rotary for over 35 years.

Read about the Rotary Foundation which enables clubs like ours to leverage funding for our projects, both locally and abroad, and please donate if you can.