We’ve been busy!
Since January, we have delivered 7 more Resilience Programmes to 180 children in South Wales with funding from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. The whole project, since funding from the UKSPF began in November 2024, has enabled a total of 468 children to benefit from our programme!
General achievements: The programme was met with enthusiastic approval including both children and staff, generating hundreds of positive testimonials and strong recommendations to other schools and requests for future return visits.
Significant Mental Toughness Improvement: Using online psychometric testing, data analysis revealed an average 68% of all participants improving their mental toughness within the five day programme, surpassing our predicted 52% and marking a record high for us!
Overcoming Fears and Building Confidence: “When we went up the mountain, I was really scared, but you changed that. I felt prouder and bolder. I’ve learned to be brave, and I want to go out with my family more. You are amazing people!“
Empowering Individuals: (A boy who has a hearing impairment): “The instructors helped me become confident. Now I will believe in myself more, have confidence, and follow my dreams.”
Inspiring Future Adventures and Resilience: “My best memories were the view from the mountaintop and everyone cheering when I reached the top. I’m going to start rock climbing! Resilience will help a lot in the future. The Resilience Programme is perfect, please don’t change, I would so recommend this to others.”
Developing a “Can-Do” Attitude: “From now on, I’m not going to give up or say no to a challenge. I’ve learned to be confident, especially when we go to competitions. It was really good and fun.”
Building partnerships: This project has helped us build relationships with more schools that have seen the benefit of our programme and are now integrating some of our techniques and tasks into everyday teaching. We’ve also established a strong working relationship with Children’s Services, paving the way for future collaborative work.
Staff feedback highlights the programme’s value:
Preparing Students for Transition: “They will definitely use many of the things they have learned this week to help them with the challenge of transitioning to secondary school. The programme has been amazing!”
“The tasks will be easy to implement within the classroom. Resilience and depending on others are very important life lessons for them. Thank you all so much! The children have loved being in your company. Your patience and understanding really made the activities so much more achievable for lots of the children”
The project has provided crucial evidence to demonstrate our programme’s effectiveness, enabling us to transition from a CIC to a CIO, achieving full charity status and allowing us to recruit 5 Trustees. The experience of the new trustees will widen our fundraising capabilities to improve the sustainability of our charity.
From feedback received through this project, we have also developed our programme further to suit the needs of the participants.
The experience gained has also contributed to the development of our team, further strengthening our capacity to deliver impactful programmes!
Call of the Wild Development Trust CIO 