We are committed to keeping an inclusive and supportive environment for all participants and the funding would be helping the 74 children who currently attend DASS (we're hoping more will join with the new P1 intake).  The project will be to purchase Arts and Crafts items.  Our young people currently freely use the outdoor spaces on the land for physcial activity but we greatly miss Arts and Crafts.  The objective is to help our young people enjoy their experience in our service whilst using their own expressive ways to communicate and have fun, learn and create. We like to give our young people freedom to be creative and to work on project themes directed by staff.  We will work on making items from our environment like tunnels and creating images and characters important to the individual for example; making a cat or a house out of crafts.  We will be offering painting, cutting and glue work, coloured card activities, clay work, string work, crayons, pipe cleaning and paper plates along with buttons, cotton balls, tapes, etc. We would greatly appreciate the chance to provide this service again. 

Printing copies of ‘Oshay’s Party Invite’ - £900.00 for approx. 200 copies.

The story of 'Oshay's Party Invite' was written by one of the children Oshay’s support, and is how we got our current name, It’s an inspiring children’s story all about friendship and inclusion, following an octopus named Oshay. At the moment we have the book in pdf form, but we would love to have printed copies of the paperback book issued to each of the south Ayrshire libraries if possible and be able to issue a copy to families that we support. We would also be able to collect donations for copies of the book which could contribute towards reprinting the book in the future. We have contacted South Ayrshire libraries and have the information we need for the book to be issued to each library in South Ayrshire if we are successful, and they are supportive of the idea. 

The books will also be used for reading sessions in nurseries and schools, where copies are given out to children to read along with us – the story follows a character who is ‘different’ from his friends, and it shows how help and support from friends can help people thrive. As well as the positive messaging within the story, we intend to use the books to encourage reading in the families that we work with, improving literacy, and strengthening bonds between children and guardians.

2 X Eco Roller Banners (PVC Free) - £133.27

We would like to hold an event to launch the book and we could really do with updating our outdated marketing materials for Oshay’s – so we have also included a request for 2 new roller banners which can be used for years to come to promote what we do at events. We would like to work with South Ayrshire Libraries on a book launch event which these would be used at.

New Desktop Computer for our Main Office - ASUS AiO A5402WVA 23.8" All-in-One PC – Intel® Core™ i7, 1 TB SSD, Black - £949.00

Now that we are working hard to develop our social media and online presence, we have noticed that our computer is really struggling with the increased usage and is often unable to keep up with editing photos and videos – we would like to apply for a new PC for the office that can keep up with the demands of creating content to promote what we do. Our current PC is so slow and is now struggling with everyday tasks. We also need to finalise some edits to the book before it goes to print; a new computer that could run this software would allow us to do this in house and save us cost of outsourcing this. We are also hoping to start a podcast which will provide support for neurodiverse families and we would need a new computer with more processing power to be able to make this happen. The model we hope to purchase has enough processing power to handle all of the above and will last us well into the future.