The family of Harriet Ryley, who died from bowel cancer aged 58, have chosen to support children’s development charity Peeple from a fund created in her memory.
The Harriet Ryley Foundation was established in 2020 by Harriet’s family as a named fund held and managed by Oxfordshire Community Foundation (OCF). The ambition of the fund is to give people in Oxfordshire the skills to lead better lives. The fund has been built over four years with donations from Harriet’s friends and family, and is now in a position to make a substantial grant.
The Ryley family wanted to make a transformational, multi-year grant to a single organisation, and worked closely with OCF to identify local charities doing work that they felt would have inspired Harriet. They recognised that multi-year funding provides long-term stability to groups, enabling meaningful changes to take place.
The fund awarded a grant of £75,000 (spread over three years) to Peeple, a charity that supports parents, carers, babies and children to learn together and improve children’s life outcomes. This grant will enable Peeple to reach more families in disadvantaged areas of Oxford, where demand for early years literacy support currently exceeds availability. Despite its reputation for educational excellence, some parts of Oxford city have some of the worst educational outcomes in England, with one in six children in the city living in poverty.
The funding from the Harriet Ryley Foundation will upscale their evidence-based Peep Learning Together programme which supports parents as their children’s first educators, alongside providing free books to families through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
Dr Sally Smith, CEO at Peeple said: “We’re absolutely delighted to have received this funding, which will enable us to support parents in Oxford to give their children a brilliant start in literacy. Our programme, Peep Learning Together, has been shown to make significant positive difference to early literacy outcomes, which impact children’s chances in education and later life. We’re grateful that this grant has enabled us to hire an additional staff member, to support local families by delivering this programme, and to reach more families in the community.”
The work of Peeple embodies many of the passions and interests that were important to Harriet. We asked the Ryley family to tell us a bit about Harriet. Her husband John told us:
“We are delighted to support the charity Peeple, with its emphasis on encouraging parents to recognise the benefits of sharing books and stories with their young children. For many years Harriet, a huge reader herself, listened to school children who needed help with their reading. But she was far more than that.
“Harriet was compassionate, courageous and caring. Time and time again she helped others less lucky than herself. She was prepared to take on anyone and anything, prepared to question those in charge, and she dared to say and do what the rest of us don’t.
“As a young mother Harriet rescued the Witney Toy library. She went on to lead a successful action group to have a cinema complex built on Witney’s old football ground, Marriott’s Close, defeating a plan for a giant superstore. She stood and won on this ‘single ticket’ issue at the local elections in 2003 to become an independent district councillor. Public service she took seriously. She was a board member of the housing association Cottsway for more than 10 years, and an ardent believer in the benefits of social housing.
“Harriet’s ability to be in the present, to enjoy the moment, was inspirational. She dazzled. Her nickname in the pubs on the west coast of Ireland when she was an au pair was ‘Hurricane Harriet’. From the nightclubs in Ibiza in the early 1980s to her home in West Oxfordshire, Harriet always lived life at a decent lick. She was a bit of a rock chic who went on to read the news on TV. A beloved, cherished and much-missed mother, daughter, sister and wife.”
We so are grateful that the Ryley family have chosen OCF to help continue Harriet’s legacy of supporting people to thrive and achieve their potential.