The Elizabeth Foundation

Our special 30th Anniversary Newsletter celebrating 30 years (1981-2011) at The Elizabeth Foundation is now available to download.

We are running another of our popular Bradford Raffles with lots of lovely prizes including a 30 minute flight, weekends away in Yorkshire, a golfing day for four and cash prizes. Our Bradford Christmas draw this year will take place on Monday 12th December 2011 at 3.30pm.

Tickets are £1.00 each and available from The Elizabeth Foundation in Bradford. Please contact Margaret by email or on 01274 382282 if you need more information. Thank you and Good Luck!

Here are the winning raffle ticket numbers, with all prizes having been claimed. Congratulations to our lucky winners and thank you to everyone who took part!

We have five new card designs this year, all priced at £3.40 per pack of 10 cards plus 60p postage & packing so please place your orders now and you will be donating £1 per pack profit to The Elizabeth Foundation. Please contact Alison Robinson at The Elizabeth Foundation with any questions, or email Alison at alison.robinson@elizabeth-foundation.org

The Elizabeth Foundation is delighted to announce the creation of a new and exciting position of Director of Children and Family Services at the charity for pre-school deaf children and their parents. This new and challenging role has been awarded to Julie Hughes, and will include leading, developing, monitoring and participating in the delivery of the range of services that The Elizabeth Foundation provides for children who are deaf and their families.

Ms Hughes, who previously worked at The Elizabeth Foundation from 1994-2005, said “having worked at The Elizabeth Foundation as a Teacher of the Deaf for eleven years, I had the privilege of supporting many families in the variety of services that the organisation provides. I am very excited to be back and I am looking forward to helping to create the latest chapter in the development of this special charity.”

Founded in 1981, The Elizabeth Foundation is now celebrating 30 years of services, and has helped nearly 1,000 families through its two Family Centres, and National Home Learning Programmes.

The Charity’s Founder and CEO, Shirley Metherell, who has been running the Charity, for 30 years, since her youngest daughter Elizabeth was diagnosed with a profound hearing loss said “We have been searching for two years for the right person to take on this very important role. I am both relieved and excited to have Julie back with us. She understands exactly what The Foundation is all about, and I have absolute faith in her abilities. The developments of our specialist services are in very good hands.”

We always do our best to stay open when the weather is bad, because we know how much effort families put into attending and how much fun the children have when they are with us. Sometimes however, we have to make changes to our services because of the snow and ice. If you are not sure if our Centres are open, please get in touch with us to check:

Please accept our apologies if we cannot get to the telephone quickly. We may be short staffed.

Have a browse through our latest edition of 'In the News' and see where The Elizabeth Foundation has been featured in the press recently

In early December 2009, our Hampshire Centre was visited by Ofsted for an inspection. These visits take place unannounced, every 2-4 years. We were thrilled to learn that Ofsted gave us top marks in every single category - we are officially Outstanding! This means we are allowed to use a special logo, so watch out for it in our newsletters. If you would like to read the full report, it can be found at the Ofsted website .

Ofsted said "The centre provides a truly unique service.....It is their ability to support both the children and their families and produce such excellent outcomes for children that is the key to their outstanding practice."

For all the very latest news from The Elizabeth Foundation, why not take a look at our newsletter for both sites, Listen! Hampshire Spring 2010 and Listen! Yorkshire Spring 2010 . We think it looks great - but please tell us what you think. Send any comments about the newsletter or the stories featured, to Alison Robinson.

The Elizabeth Foundation in Bradford was thrilled to receive a £2000 donation and a promise of ongoing support from the Safeguarding Children e-Academy. SCe-A, one of the UK's leading providers of flexible e-learning Child Protection courses, donates a sizable percentage of its turnover every year to deserving charities across the UK. Its 51 members, mostly comprised of Local Safeguarding Children Boards, were asked where the money should go to and along with several other organisations the Elizabeth Foundation was singled out.

Margaret Southern was delighted to welcome representatives from SCe-A recently, and said that "The current economic climate has hit us hard with levels of donations dropping and local business being reluctant to support us and so we are delighted with the Safeguarding Children e-Academy’s kind gift". Staff and children at The Elizabeth Foundation in Bradford hope that SCe-A's support will be the start of further commitments from local organisations and statutory partners to help secure the Centre's future.

Rugby star Lawrence Dallaglio has presented a donation to help tackle deafness in Portsmouth. Lawrence was in town on Thursday as director of motivation of The Listening Company, based on Isambard Brunel Road and he handed over a cheque for £5,000 for the Elizabeth Foundation's Raise the Roof project.

The hand-over launched the company's Decade Trust, which will see employees encouraged to raise as much money as possible for foundation, which supports pre-school children with hearing loss and their families.

Fundraising manager Alison Robinson said: "He was lovely. One girl, a four-year-old called Katy Scanes, brought him a t-shirt to sign and he put a wonderful message on it, which just read 'Katy, Follow your dreams', which is exactly what we are letting the youngsters know."

'We knew the company's staff had been doing things like quiz nights so we expected maybe there'd be £1,000 so we were flabbergasted! It's an amazing amount of money.'

Photo - right: Rugby's Lawrence Dallaglio with Elizabeth Foundation pre-school children in Portsmouth.

The Elizabeth Foundation is a member of "Remember a Charity", a group that promotes giving to charities in your Will. We are delighted that the 2009 Remember a Charity media campaign gave us the opportunity to be featured on BBC One's The Politics Show on Sunday 26th April at 3pm. During a live broadcast from The Elizabeth Foundation in Hampshire our work was featured as the programme's South Region feature for the day (at approximately 3.30pm). We were joined by Sarah McCarthy-Fry MP and other guests.

The main construction phase of building work was completed in February and our lovely new Family Centre looks stunning! We are working hard to be fully operational after the Easter Holidays, and making plans for all the exciting new phases of development inside. Projects on the drawing board incude:

See our Raise The Roof Appeal pages for more information about how to help, and some photographs! We will be posting more photos soon, so please return again. Our grateful thanks go to:

.....and all our specialist contractors and advisors including: Peter Davies (Structural Engineer), Ellis Electrical Ltd, Opal Telecom Ltd, The Alarming Company, Solent Sound and Fire Systems Ltd, Sound Advice (Acoustics), Robert Blair Raines (Mechanical Consultant).

Building work has started! Raise the Roof project begins at The Elizabeth Foundation, Cosham

On a lovely sunny day in May, we gathered to celebrate the start of the Raise the Roof building project and the signature of our contract with Amiri Construction Ltd. Watch out for coverage on the local press!

Kevin Lendon (Amiri), Alasdair Reid (Davis Langdon), Sally Moger (The Elizabeth Foundation), Roger Boyce (Architect), Heidi Ormsby (Chair, The Elizabeth Foundation), Shirley Metherell (Founder & CEO, The Elizabeth Foundation).

The children joined in too! Spot the real builders...

Amiri Construction site team, and helpers from The Elizabeth Foundation!

Watch this space for more news and pictures as building progresses...

Shirley Metherell launches our "Raise The Roof" appeal!

At our Beethoven Ball on 10 November, CEO and Founder Shirley Metherell and her husband Dave were delighted to announce the launch of a major Fundraising Appeal called "Raise the Roof!".

The Appeal is needed to finance construction work to double the size of our original Family Centre building at Cosham, Hampshire. Our supporters will remember that the Family Centre was lovingly "self built" by the Metherells and other founder-families, nearly 25 years' ago. It has served us so well, and helped us to help hundreds of families with young deaf children over the years.

Now we need to grow! We will put a whole new top storey on the building, giving us the opportunity to modernise and expand as well as allowing us longer term to establish the new baby unit right next door to the Newborn Hearing Screening facility where it belongs. We will also be able to create a much-needed resource centre for our Home Learning Programme, which is rapidly gaining new enrolments following introduction of our web-based enrolment form.

Please take a look at our first Appeal Brochure and also details of our "Buy a Brick" Campaign in support of our Appeal - Buy a Brick for £10 or more, and place an entry in our commemorative "Roll of Honour Book".

Please come back again soon for more news about "Raise the Roof!".

CIVIC AWARD David and Shirley Metherell 2007

Portsmouth City Council presented a Civic Award to our Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Shirley Metherell, during this year's Mayor Making Ceremony. The award was "in recognition of her outstanding achievement in creating The Elizabeth Foundation and the support which it has provided to babies and young children who are deaf or hard of hearing, and their families". Shirley said she felt really honoured to receive this from her home city.

WOODLAND TRAIL OFFICIAL OPENING Cutting the ribbon

We were delighted to welcome Admiral Sir Jonathon Band, the First Sea Lord, to The Elizabeth Foundation in February. After a tour around the Family Centre and the Hearing Clinic, he and his wife Sarah officially opened our Woodland Walk area by cutting the ribbon at the entrance (pictured), and leading the way down the new pathway. Our pre-schooler children followed closely behind, clutching their green and purple Elizabeth Foundation balloons.

IMPACT AWARDS

Impact Awards Logo The Elizabeth Foundation was Highly Commended in the 2006 Impact Awards announced last year, reaching the top 25 of over 300 UK-wide entrants in this annual, prestigious award scheme run by Glaxosmithkline in partnership with The Kings Fund. The awards ceremony was held at the National Gallery, London, and we were delighted to be recognised as one of the leading "Impact" groups in the country making a real difference to peoples lives.