Help for Heroes is a household name; famous for being one of the UK's largest service charities and providing support for service personnel who have been injured, sick or wounded in the line of duty. But that is where many people's understanding of Help for Heroes ends. With incredible earnings of over £125 million in just 4 ½ years, how does the charity spend donations?
Some of Help for Heroes' biggest projects are Personal Recovery and Assessment Centres (PRACs), which serve the charity's principal purpose of providing care and support for service personnel. Once the wounded have been rehabilitated back to health at Headley Court, PRACs serve the function of providing aftercare through their holistic life skills course and fun activities to get the wounded, sick and injured back into what they enjoy doing most.
Help for Heroes works to provide and maintain five tri-service PRACs; in Tidworth, Colchester, Catterick, Plymouth and Edinburgh. The Defence Recovery Capability is a Ministry of Defence initiative, and they work with Help for Heroes and other service charities such as the Royal British Legion to provide a high level of care for members of the Armed Forces in these centres.
The flagship of Help for Heroes' five UK wide PRACs is Tedworth House, situated in the Garrison town of Tidworth in Wiltshire. Tedworth House is a facility which offers support for all service personnel, whether they are or were in the Army, Navy or RAF. Set in a stunning Grade 2 listed stately home, Tedworth has a pivotal role in the recovery process for members of the Armed Forces. It can accommodate over 50 residents and many more day visitors at any one time, providing facilities such as a state-of-the-art gym and once at a full operating capacity, it will offer a sports complex with specialist adapted equipment and a swimex, a range of courses, classes and trips offering help and education, and acting as a meeting point to promote socialising with other servicemen and women. Service personnel can seek lifestyle advice from trained professionals on money management, employment, relationships, housing and prosthetic limbs, among a huge range of other topics.
It cost Help for Heroes £17m to turn the stately home into the PRAC it is today. To understand the scale of the project, 6,300 miles of cabling were used throughout the house for power, telephones and computers and fire systems, 8 tonnes of Emulsion paint was used and over 6,500 items of furniture and other items have been identified and ordered. Despite this, the huge renovation project took just 16 weeks to complete, and it is expected that the house will be operating at full capacity by September 2012. £15 million has so far been funded to cover running costs for the next 10 years, enabling Help for Heroes and other service charities offer support until at least 2012.
Tedworth House is already one of Help for Heroes' proudest achievements and it wouldn't have been possible without the support from the fantastic British public. The venue will enable service personnel to become stronger, healthier and generally more inspired, and Help for Heroes is hoping that donations will allow them to continue their work, providing support for service personnel for many more years to come.
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