About us
Founded in 1953, Buttle UK is a charity dedicated to supporting children and young people across the UK who face crisis situations, financial hardship, and multiple social challenges. Our mission is to enhance emotional, educational, and social outcomes through targeted interventions, primarily through our Chances for Children grants.
We support children and young people living in severe poverty, often on incomes under £18,000 a year. Many face challenges such as domestic abuse, mental health issues, estrangement, or neglect. Our grants, up to £2,400, are tailored to each individual’s needs. This can be as simple as a new school uniform to help them settle in school; support for family or play therapy; or membership of a club or activity so that they can explore something they enjoy, socialise and have opportunities to make friends. We can also help with items like beds, toys, clothes or even a TV. Our grants help children to live a life that feels a little more like other children's. For those experiencing particularly disruptive home environments, we also provide grants enabling access to boarding school placements. These initiatives are designed to create safe, nurturing environments and foster wellbeing-promoting activities, ultimately empowering children and young people to thrive academically, emotionally, and socially.
Our work in co-production
It has been our goal to embed the concept of co-production into our culture and work, so we can harness the power of those with direct experience of the issues we seek to address. To support this, we have developed two key groups:
A Youth Advisory Panel of young people aged 16-25 who have experienced crises and financial hardship.
An Advisory Network consisting of professionals and families with learned and lived experiences of the issues Buttle UK is trying to tackle.
Our strategy
Our vision: All children in the UK have a chance for change.
Our mission: The maintenance, education and advancement in life of children and young people who through poverty and family circumstances are in need of, and will benefit significantly from, Buttle UK’s support.
Our values are to be: child-focussed, empathetic, responsive, accountable and collaborative.
Our context as we step into our next strategy
We will shortly come to the end of our ‘Working Together for Children and Young People’, 2020-25 strategy and will reach our goal of supporting over 25,000 children and young people by the end of this period. Child poverty continues to increase in the UK, and unless this figure turns around sharply, we will see greater need for the simple items and activities we provide, yet all of us would agree are essential for children.
We currently provide direct support to alleviate the impact of poverty and crisis, but we are not tackling the underlying issues that drive poverty. Our own report, ‘Growing up in Poverty’ (2024) highlights that the situation our Chances for Children grants aim to support is getting tougher in an incredibly challenging environment and that we are facing a ‘poverty emergency’. Knowing what we know, we believe that we cannot continue to only intervene in this way without working to change a broken system that is dragging more into poverty, particularly the most vulnerable that are also facing significant crises in their lives.
Strategy 2025-30
By moving beyond a reactive approach and leveraging our unique assets, Buttle UK aims to create lasting, systemic change, ensuring that poverty and crisis do not define a child's future. This strategy positions us not just as a grant-maker but as a changemaker, committed to ensuring that no child’s future is determined by poverty and crisis.
Our 2025-30 strategy has three key objectives towards our aim to ensure that poverty and crisis does not define a child’s future:
1. Deliver impactful grants
2. Amplify our voice for change
3. Harness the power of our resources
Strategic objective 1 - Deliver impactful grants
Goal 1 - continue to deliver our Chances for Children grants as a rapid and critical UK-wide intervention to address the immediate needs of children and young people in poverty and crisis.
Goal 2 - work collaboratively/in partnership to build deeper and targeted support with the most highly-vulnerable children and young people to offer longer-term grant support to help them progress and thrive.
Goal 3 - evolve our grants model to continue to ensure grants are equitable, non-judgemental and efficient, including seeking to empower recipients whilst reducing the burden of delivery on frontline workers.
Strategic objective 2 - Amplify our voice for change
Goal 1 - develop and strengthen our brand to position us as both a critical provider of direct grant support and a leading advocate for systemic change so that no child is defined by poverty and crisis.
Goal 2 - amplify our external voice to influence policy and practice, using data from our grant-making, co-production partners, and research to explore, drive and support impactful policy and campaigns that address the root causes of child poverty and crisis.
Strategic objective 3 - Harness the power of our resources
Goal 1 - develop and deliver a financial model that combines the power of growing diversified fundraising income streams with the ability of our endowment to strengthen long-lasting impact for the most vulnerable children and young people
Goal 2 - resource new partnerships and programmes and develop our technology and general infrastructure frameworks.
Finances
Our annual budget is around £8.5m. Buttle UK’s head office is in London, UK.
Our annual report 2023/24 can be found here.
Equity, diversity and inclusion statement
We work to ensure that our grants programmes are accessible to those with the highest needs, and we actively seek to engage marginalised communities in our outreach. Our deeper programmes will support groups that we feel are most vulnerable, lacking support and where their voices are unheard. Poverty affects minoritised groups disproportionately, and to have the best understanding of these groups, we need to ensure diversity runs through our wider team. This should be considered in our staff team, trustees, and co-production partners as well as our spokespeople for Buttle UK, taking the chance to support and train those we work with to speak about the challenges of poverty and crisis. You can read more about our EDI strategy to be a truly inclusive organisation here.