About Luma
Luma Foundation is the new name for a charity that has supported Yorkshire's children's wards since 1989. The purpose has never changed. The ambition has.
Our story
Drag through the milestones, or jump to a year.
Registered with the Charity Commission on 12 July 1989, the Trust set out with a simple purpose that still guides us today: to provide essential equipment and improve services for children's and neonatal wards in Yorkshire that cannot be funded from any other source.
Run entirely by volunteers from a house in the North Yorkshire village of Well, the Trust became the Yorkshire Children's Hospital Fund and quietly funded equipment wherever it was needed, from Leeds and Sheffield to Bradford, Barnsley and York.
Under Jo Ropner's chairmanship the Fund made more than 25 grants: baby breathing monitors for bereaved families with The Lullaby Trust, a baby MRI incubator for Leeds' congenital heart unit, gastrointestinal surgery simulators at Sheffield Children's, MRI audio-visual equipment so children could be scanned without a general anaesthetic, suction units for Martin House hospice and a home-dialysis training machine for Leeds.
Alex Duckett, whose daughter had life-saving surgery at Leeds Children's Hospital, joined the board alongside Edward Marsden, Clementine Duckett and Consultant Paediatric Surgeon Mr Naved Alizai. Together they set a new goal: to fund the advanced surgical and diagnostic technology that would otherwise be out of reach for Yorkshire's children.
Luma means light. The name marks a brighter, more ambitious future for the charity, with Alex Duckett as Chair and a target of £500,000 for robotic and minimally invasive surgical technology for children's and neonatal wards.
Our inaugural Charity Clay Day brought Yorkshire's business community together in the North York Moors. By the end of July the £100,000 Laparo Apex surgical simulator was installed at Leeds Children's Hospital, training the next generation of keyhole surgeons.
Our second Clay Day funded two photobiomodulation units for Leeds Children's Hospital, easing the painful mouth ulcers that children undergoing chemotherapy so often suffer. Fewer children in pain, fewer nights in hospital.
With a growing programme of projects and partnerships, the trustees appointed Luma's first Chief Executive to lead the charity day to day and build lasting relationships with hospitals and businesses across the region.
Our third Clay Day, at the Snilesworth Estate, helped us pass a £100,000 target and fund nanopore sequencing technology for Sheffield Children's Hospital. It will cut the wait for a brain tumour diagnosis from six to eight weeks to around 24 hours.
Be part of the next chapter
Every Clay Day, corporate partnership and donation brings another piece of world-class equipment to a Yorkshire hospital.
