Grants from charitable trusts and foundations are a vitally important part of how we fund our work with girls and young women. Whether you want to support our core activity, or fund a specific project, together, we can make a real difference for girls and young women.
If your organisation is interested in our work, we would love to hear from you and to share more about what we do. Get in touch on fundraising@girlsfriendlysociety.org.uk
Our Trust Fundraising team are here to ensure that we are able to help you meet your objectives and understand the impact that your funding has had. Last year, with the help of our trust supporters, we were able to
- Open seven new GFS groups in areas where girls need us most
- Recruit 300 new girls
- Onboard 10 new Group Coordinators to improve the consistency of our sessions and support volunteers on the ground
- Recruit our first ever Programme and Impact Manager, to ensure that our sessions are having the most impact for girls
Current funding priorities
- Funding to support new group launches and ongoing running
- Funding to expand how we increase girls’ involvement in our programme and organisational planning
- Funding to expand our Group Coordinator model
- Funding to cover vital core costs that allow us to continue to deliver our work across England and Wales
A national charity with a local model
GFS has groups across England and Wales. While we offer support for groups centrally, our groups are all unique in order to meet the needs of the local community. Head office support creates consistency and allows groups to focus their time on what matters most – making the GFS experience amazing for girls and young women.
Here’s what we mean..
We have a wonderful programme team, who create four sessions each term, for groups to deliver. They are based on the GFS Girl and our approach to improving girls’ confidence, resilience and wellbeing.
However, groups are encouraged to tweak these sessions to ensure they are suitable for the girls in the group, and relevant for any issues that are particularly pertinent. The groups come up with their own content for the rest of the sessions that term, to make sure the girls
Each group has access to spend their own funding, which is allocated via our head office. This gives groups power over their spending, ranging from trips out to venue hire.
GFS and Sandwell Council of Voluntary Organisations
SCVO funded the launch of GFS Smethwick as part of their Vision 2030 fund back in 2020. Lockdowns during the pandemic caused some delays to the launch, but we were able to work closely with SCVO to provide regular updates about our progress. GFS Smethwick finally launched in November 2021 to huge success. Over 20 girls attended the launch, and the group has been running a waiting list ever since.
GFS Smethwick was one of the first GFS groups to pilot our paid Group Coordinator model, thanks to SCVO’s support, and the success of this model has been clear. Girl and volunteer retention at GFS Smethwick proved to be outstanding – so much so that we are opening a second group in Smethwick in the coming year to accommodate the demand.
The success at GFS Smethwick gave us the green light to role out our Group Coordinator model to more GFS groups, and we are delighted to have seen the same positive affects around the country. We are so grateful for the supportive relationship we develop SCVO, without whom, none of this would have been possible.
Thank you to our supporters
We would like to thank all of our partners over the last 12 months for the support they have shown to GFS.
