OUR HISTORY

Our charity was founded by four families who had young children with Down syndrome in September 2000. It’s first support meeting for families was at Haworth Road Methodist Church Hall; a venue still used once per month for our family Saturday morning sessions
In 2002 we became a registered charity and in 2009 a charitable company.
In 2005, receiving our first large grant from the Big Lottery Fund we saw big changes to the charity. We established our first small premises on Heights Lane employing one member of staff and began to deliver training courses – written and developed by Wendy Uttley, dance classes for children aged 6 upwards, speech and language group sessions and early intervention sessions.
We worked with many local maternity wards to deliver awareness training and developed our new parent pack.
In 2009 we moved to a new centre, in Idle, calling it The Pamela Sunter Centre after a lady called Pamela who happened to have Down syndrome. A legacy had been left following her death and the money was bequeathed to us enabling us to continue to develop our services following the end of our lottery funding.
We moved to our current premises, based in Bingley, January 2013. This now provides a large room for delivering training, two smaller rooms where we deliver our early intervention sessions, ample office space, a parents room, a library room and a large attic where we run our wonderful youth club, the WisH Club (Weekend is Here).