Founder Katie Piper given OBE in New Year’s Honours List
Founder Katie Piper is now Katie Piper OBE after receiving an Honour from Her Majesty The Queen! Here’s Katie’s reflections about this special start to 2022.
“Dear supporters of The Katie Piper Foundation,
This is without doubt, one of the happiest times of my life. I am so honoured to be recognised on the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list for services to charity and survivors of burns.
The Katie Piper Foundation has been my life’s work. It’s now into its second decade and I’m very proud to say that we’ve helped and rehabilitated thousands of survivors of burns and people with scars from traumatic incidents, with their physical and mental recovery. Funded purely by voluntary donations, we launched and founded the UK’s first and only live-in rehabilitation centre so that having a brighter future after burns can be for the majority, and not the minority of survivors.
My doctor and my family were there at the start of my journey. They were my crucial support in the early days when I was still very much recovering. They helped me to see that we could turn kind people’s donations and offers of help to me, into hope and action for others.
Carrying on through the years, the charity and the honour is in my name, but so many survivors are at the heart of it all. To them I say thank you, thank you, thank you.
This is a very special time for my family, my teammates, all survivors of burns and me.
This OBE is ALL of us.
Thank you for following, supporting and joining my life’s journey.”
Katie Piper, OBE.
Words of thanks and congratulations have been flooding in from survivors, including from Adele, also a survivor of an acid attack, and one of the first people that Katie’s charity gave access to rehabilitation to. Adele said “I don’t know where I’d be now if it wasn’t for Katie Piper and the help of her Foundation. Katie Piper is so selfless and if she can help in any way she always will. She does this privately, without it being in the public domain. I really have her to thank entirely as I wouldn’t be here, accepting my scars, back in work, accepting my past and having a life without her.”
The Katie Piper Foundation’s CEO Sarah Green said “I want to extend the Foundation’s thanks to the survivors who took the time to nominate Katie. This OBE is such a huge milestone, but it certainly isn’t the last or the biggest to come for Katie, the charity, or other survivors. If we carry on working hard and being dedicated to Katie’s vision even in these tough times, we can create a circle of protection around how far we’ve come, and move on from the challenging times we’re in, together, towards an even brighter future for survivors.”