Taylor Rose Sponsors Peterborough based charity Little Miracles Sensory Room

Taylor Rose is giving £10,000 in sponsorship to support the drop-in sensory room created by Little Miracles in the Queensgate Shopping Centre, Peterborough

Little Miracles helps families with children who have additional needs, disabilities and life-limiting conditions. With 14 sites across the eastern region, the charity offers information, support and activities for around 8000 children and their parents, as well as holding fundraising events.

Three of Little Miracles’ sites have sensory rooms, which offer a range of equipment and activities that help children feel calmer and interact with others. Late in 2017, Little Miracles set up a temporary sensory room in a vacant retail unit kindly provided by Queensgate Shopping Centre. Queensgate is one of Peterborough’s premier shopping destinations, with over 90 shops, 15 places to eat and 2300 parking spaces.

The sensory room proved enormously popular, attracting many adults with special needs as well as disabled children and their families from across the region. This success prompted Little Miracles to look into extending the project. Now the Queensgate Centre has generously offered another unit free of charge for a full six months, with support from Taylor Rose and Leeton Group.

Taylor Rose, whose staff have been fundraising for the charity for the last year, is providing a much-needed financial boost of £10,000 to help with the costs of setting up and running the sensory room. The firm will also continue its fundraising efforts for Little Miracles, with major activities planned for later in the year.

For their part, Leeton Group are volunteering their services to help make the unit more suitable for its purpose, including installing a disabled toilet. The toilet, which will include a hoist for wheelchair users, will be a huge help to families of children with physical disabilities, allowing them to consider visits and longer trips away from home that might otherwise be too challenging.

‘We’re very excited to have all four organisations working together to create the sensory room,’ says Michelle King, CEO of Little Miracles. ‘Without Queensgate we wouldn’t have a room at all. Without Taylor Rose we wouldn’t have been able to afford the equipment. And without Leeton’s we wouldn’t have been able to install the toilet. Together, these things will make a real difference for disabled people in Peterborough.’

‘We’re delighted to offer our support to the Little Miracles sensory room,’ adds Adrian Jaggard, MD of Taylor Rose. ‘They offer a real lifeline to families of children with special needs, who often struggle to find the right support. With this sensory room, we hope they’ll be able to reach out to even more families over the next six months.’

Mark Broadhead, Centre Director at Queensgate Shopping Centre said: ‘We are delighted to be supporting Little Miracles and excited to welcome the new sensory room to Queensgate. Ensuring the centre is a positive experience and inclusive for all our customers is extremely important to us, which is why the sensory room has our complete support.’

The Little Miracles Sensory Room is set to open on 29 March, while the hoisted toilet should be operational from mid-April, just after the Easter school holidays, when a formal opening is planned. You can find it at Unit 27 in the Queensgate Shopping Centre.

• Learn more about Little Miracles activities, events and volunteering at www.littlemiraclescharity.org.uk.

• For more information about Leeton Group please contact Mark Campbell Finance Manager www.leetongroup.co.uk