Despite my elder sisters and brother being involved in The Newman Trust since the mid-nineties, it was actually a friend, Paul McLean, who persuaded me to go on my first Queen Mary’s Newman Trust holiday in 2005.

The Newman Holiday Trust has been running for nearly 25 years providing children between the ages of four and 16, and with special needs, Summer holidays. It now runs six holidays across the UK and is growing. The Trust is entirely volunteer run yet provides one to one care for each child in a safe environment, in fact, the standards on the holidays are so high that, as the only charity registered as a care home running holidays in the UK, The Newman Holiday Trust regularly achieves levels of Good and Outstanding during OFSTED inspections.

Although I had experience working with children with disabilities when volunteering with The Middlesbrough Catholic Handicapped Fellowship, I was still a ‘newby’ on Newman Trust Holidays. I was quite apprehensive, but after a day of training and meeting the other volunteers, some new, some not so new, I felt a lot more at ease.

After a week looking after a delightful, very active, yet non-verbal, boy called Matthew, I was hooked. I had had so much fun. Trips to theme parks, bouncy castles, ice-cream parlours and petting farms, to name just a few of the activities.

Three years on and I am now a member of the Trust’s Executive Committee and I am running my own holiday in Reading for children from Berkshire and Oxfordshire. It’s a lot of hard work, especially travelling down to the South on a regular basis, as well as keeping up-to-date with Care Home Minimum standards, infection control policy and, of course, processing CRB checks, but it is all worthwhile as I know it’s for a massively important cause.

The Trust is run completely on donations, it receives no monetary backing from the Government, and because it costs upwards of £8,000 to run a holiday, it can be very difficult to raise funds each year. The Trust is also always in need of new volunteers. Finding volunteers who are willing to give up a week of their Summer holiday, or take a week of leave from their job, are difficult to find. I think this is the reason why the holidays are so much fun though. People with the caring nature and fun-loving attitude enough to give up so much of their life, makes for a great friendship circle within the Trust.

Queen Mary’s School is in Topcliffe near Thirsk, within the Middlesbrough Diocese. Many of the children, past and present, are from Middlesbrough, as are many of the volunteers. This year’s holiday was a real success, it gets better every year. Flamingo Land, Uncle Mal, the magician, and singing ‘The Pony Song’ being the highlights for many of the children and helpers, not to mention a visit from Fr Pat Keogh.

It was he who insisted that I write this piece. He said that it was a shame that something so worthy should be going on within our Diocese without anyone within the Catholic community really knowing. After all, The Newman Trust does take its name from Cardinal John Henry Newman due to his caring attitude towards children.

The Queen Mary’s holiday, as with all The Newman Trust Holidays, caters for children with a wide range of disabilities. The children take so much out of the holidays and we often receive letters of thanks after the holidays from parents AND children saying what a difference the holiday has made. The Trust’s motto is ìchanges lives…î and it does.

One recent letter from a mother commented on her reluctance at letting her daughter come away without her for the first time, but that afterwards she said that the stimulation and enjoyment her daughter took from the holiday will directly improve her daughter’s health, and that she was seeing the effects already. She said that her daughter had spent most of her short life in hospital and for something like The Newman Holiday Trust to do this was angelic.

It is for reasons like this that The Newman Holiday Trust needs your support, whether it is financially, offering your time to help, or helping to publicise (which we really need), all help is gratefully accepted.

Visit www.newmantrust.org for more details
or
visit www.justgiving.com/newmantrust to donate.

Thank you

Robert Nestor