This Christmas, one gift can light up 16 children’s charities.

Christmas giving can be overwhelming. So much need, so many charities. It’s hard to know where your kindness will count most.

Raise Your Hands makes it simple.
When you give to us, you’re standing behind 16 of the most outstanding small charities in the UK, the ones making sure children and young people feel safe, warm and remembered this Christmas.

Donate Today

✨ That’s about £5 to each charity

A single gift to Raise Your Hands supports work like…

Donate to children's charities

Young carers feeling seen

Young carers carry so much. They spend their days looking after someone they love, and their own needs often come second. MyTime Young Carers’ projects such as Operation Christmas, which sends festive gifts to young carers, make sure they feel seen not just at Christmas but throughout the year.

Children in care alone at Christmas

Become is there for young people leaving care, who are often expected to face adulthood alone, with no family to go home to at Christmas. From a festive meal together to regular check-in calls over the holidays, Become makes sure they don’t face it by themselves.

A chance to be “just a kid”

Basecamp Adventure Trust’s Christmas residential gives young people growing up in poverty or other difficult situations at home a chance to just be a kid and have some winter fun. As one young person told them: “Thank you for the Christmas celebrations, it’s the only Christmas I’ll get this year.”

Donate to 16 charities

One donation.
16 brilliant charities.
Thousands of children supported.

By backing Raise Your Hands this Christmas, you’re helping children and young people facing:

  • Poverty and hardship
  • Leaving care without a family safety net
  • Family separation
  • Mental health challenges
  • Caring responsibilities
  • Barriers to education
  • Trauma, anxiety and isolation

All the small charities your donation supports

Three things we promise every donor

  1. 100% goes to our charities
    We fundraise for our own running costs separately through patrons, corporate partners, and our flagship event Midnight Madness. Every penny of your donation reaches the charities.
  2. Charities we’ve chosen carefully
    Every charity on our platform goes through a rigorous selection and annual review process, so you can give knowing your money is backing work that makes a real difference.
  3. Equally distributed
    Your donation is split equally across all the charities in our platform. One gift. 16 organisations. Each one changing young lives.
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Why donors trust us

Registered
charity

Raise Your Hands is a registered Charitable Incorporated Organisation in England and Wales. Charity number: 1174956. View our Charity Commission listing.

Published impact reporting

Every year we publish a Charity Insights Report showing exactly what the charities you’ve funded have achieved. Real numbers. Real outcomes. Open to anyone who wants to read it.

Continuity of funding

We hold £480,000 in reserve — enough to deliver a full annual grant to every charity in the portfolio, even if all other income stopped tomorrow.

Ten-year track record

Since 2015, Raise Your Hands has directed more than £4 million to small UK children’s charities and worked with 24 corporate partners. In 2025 alone, our portfolio supported 77,000 children and young people.

Why small charities deliver more impact per pound

There are roughly 170,000 registered charities in England and Wales alone. Yet most of us give to just a handful of the ones we already know.

That’s not a failure of generosity. It’s a consequence of how charitable giving works. Familiar names feel safer. Established brands invest heavily in fundraising. Small charities simply lack the resources to find new donors who haven’t heard of them.

The result is a deeply unequal distribution of charitable income. And it isn’t a guide to which organisations are most effective. It is a guide to which ones have the biggest marketing budgets.


Small charities offer something larger organisations rarely can:

Specialism

Small children’s charities tend to focus on one cause, one community, one set of needs. That focus produces deep expertise — and the kind of outcomes that broad-based organisations simply cannot replicate.

Agility

Without the layers of bureaucracy, small charities respond to new needs faster than almost any other kind of organisation. They adapt. They move. They stay close to the people they serve.

Community roots

Deeply embedded in the communities they work with — trusted, accessible, and known in ways that larger charities rarely are. For the hardest-to-reach young people, that trust is everything.

Cost-effectiveness

Lower overheads, fewer layers, more of every pound reaching the frontline. The ratio of impact to investment tends to be favourable in ways that don’t always hold as organisations scale.

The challenge for most donors is identifying the exceptional small charities from the rest. That requires time, expertise, and access most people don’t have.

That is exactly what Raise Your Hands does, and has done, for over a decade.

Donate Today

✨ That’s about £5 to each charity

Your questions answered

Raise Your Hands is a UK charity that finds, funds, and champions exceptional small children’s charities. We’ve rigorously researched and selected every one of them, and review yearly. Your donation is shared equally across all, supporting work spanning mental health, youth violence, family crisis, care leavers, disability, literacy, and more. We make it simple to give to the small children’s charities doing the most extraordinary work.

→ Learn more about Raise Your Hands

Yes, 100% of your donation reaches our charities. We fundraise for our own running costs separately, through patrons, corporate partners, and our flagship event Midnight Madness. Your gift is shared equally between the charities as unrestricted funding – the most flexible and transformative kind – so they can respond to whatever their young people need most, whenever they need it.

Because the largest 5% of charities receive 88% of all charity income (Charity Commission for England and Wales, “Charities by income band”, 2026). Small charities are often the most agile, specialist and community-rooted, delivering some of the most effective frontline work for children and young people, yet they struggle to reach donors at scale. Raise Your Hands closes that gap. Your donation goes to organisations chosen precisely because they punch far above their weight.

Every charity in our portfolio has passed a rigorous five-stage assessment covering impact, leadership, governance, financial management, and safeguarding. We actively seek out the small charities the mainstream has overlooked. Most don’t appear in any Google search you’d ever run. Then we review each of them, in detail, every year. Our findings are published openly in our annual Charity Insights Reports.

→ Read about how we choose our charities

For substantial personal gifts or company donations, a direct conversation with our team is usually the best place to start. We can talk through tailored impact projections, personalised reporting, and how a larger contribution would be used. Finance firms have a dedicated corporate programme at raiseyourhands.partners.

→ Get in touch

For larger donations, we’d also encourage you to consider giving by bank transfer. It avoids card processing fees entirely, so 100% of your gift reaches our charities:

  • Name: Raise Your Hands
  • Sort code: 20-31-52
  • Account number: 23913813

If bank transfer isn’t an option, choosing a card with low fees also helps. As a rule, debit beats credit, Visa or Mastercard beats Amex, and standard beats premium.