Whitby charity praised for ‘life-changing’ work as mayor vows more support for coastal communities

During an official visit to Whitby Hidden Impairments Support and Help (WHISH) on Tuesday (Jan 21), York and North Yorkshire’s elected mayor David Skaith said that supporting rural charities and community groups was a top priority for his administration.

It comes as more than 20 community halls and hubs, including WHISH, were given a total of £600,000 from a mayoral fund to help finance renovations with further money set to be made available later this year.

Mr Skaith said: “As a combined authority we can look over the whole region and see where those areas are that are in need of certain services and we can step in.

“If we can find those gaps and there is a need for a service in Whitby or Scarborough, or wherever, then we can work with organisations that are already there to ramp up their offering,” he told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).

Parents who use the services provided by WHISH said the charity was “a lifeline” and had given them and their children a “safe haven” as well as providing recreational and educational activities that would have otherwise been inaccessible.

The charity is open six days a week and provides a multi-sensory room as well as various activities for children and teenagers including after school clubs, a food bank, swimming lessons, and cookery classes.

Cheryl, a foster carer to 12-year-old twin boys, said: “This is a place where they fit in and they’re happy and the staff are brilliant.

“It also gives us other people to talk to and the children do so many different things from horse riding to sports days, and days out – there’s just so much on offer.”

Funding for the charity from the mayor’s community programme included £22,000 for a new lift to improve accessibility, £22,000 for toilets to make them accessible and funding for sport and active travel that “taught children how to go on a bus on their own, how to travel on the train”.

Yvonne Harrison, project manager at WHISH, said: “We’re currently reaching around 30 per cent of the children with disabilities [in the area], but we’d like to reach all of them.”

Ms Harrison noted that the charity had seen a growing demand for support after the Covid pandemic partly due to the rising cost of living.

“We’ve had parents who’ve said they haven’t been able to afford to buy washing powder because they have had to spend the money on food.”

She added: “If you have a disabled child, you’re more likely to be poorer, you’re more likely for your relationship to break down, you’re more likely to be a single parent – so we’ve got disability and poverty, and then we’ve got rurality, so if there isn’t a bus service, you live on the Moors, or even just five miles outside Whitby, [perhaps] you can’t get into Whitby.”

When asked what action he was taking to ensure that people living in rural areas had access to their improved community facilities, the mayor, Mr Skaith, admitted that it was “the single biggest challenge we face in the region”.

He said he had “a team who have been designing our transport plan going forward as we will take control of transport from April of this year” and that he was “working closely with the Dales Bus and the Moors Bus to see how we can ramp up their services and their offering as well”.

The mayor added: “It is a real priority for me and how we support these projects as much as possible and that’s why I’ve put it at the heart of everything we do.”