Funding for voluntary sector organisations has always been difficult to come by, especially for organisations such as ours that undertake work in their local communities but do not have a focus that pulls at the general public’s heart strings such as sick animals or children. Not that I am knocking such charities, they do amazing work for these groups but it is much more difficult to raise funds to keep work going when you work with a whole community and in an area that is not seen as ‘deprived’.
The main focus of our work is on Warwick North, but we people use the centre from Leamington, Kenilworth and the more rural areas of Warwick District. We provide a range of activities that aim to keep our community healthy both in mind and body and to give them access to information, advice and support services that they may need. We have good relationships with a lot of our community members and provide a listening ear and support to those who need it. However, this work is not always easy to fund. There are some local grant making trusts that see the value in what we do and will fund us, but we still have to raise a lot of money each year to keep going. We have to pay the rent on the building, the gas, electricity and water as well as wages for the staff, without who the centre would be just like any other community hall, renting out rooms and employing a part-time caretaker.
Traditionally funding for the voluntary sector has come from writing bids to various local and national grant making bodies such as Lloyds TSB, the National Lottery and Children In Need. However, in the current economic climate, more and more charities are applying to these and the pots of funding available are reducing.
Because of this, organisations in the voluntary sector are having to become much more creative and look at diversifying their income streams as much as possible. We have worked on developing our income generation strategy over the last few years and now undertake a range of activities to help keep ourselves funded and sustainable. As well as applying for funding, we rent out rooms in the centre, we organise fund raising events such as ladies pamper evenings and quiz nights, we provide placements and a Practice Assessor for social work students from the local universities (for which we get paid), we have tendered for a couple of contracts and we have developed our own social enterprise company - The Gap Creative, through which we provide bespoke youth arts sessions to other organisations for a fee.
However, the biggest change in funding locally that has affected us is the change by Warwick District Council from grant funding (through which we got a small annual grant) to a tendering process for the Voluntary and Community Sector as providers of key services for local communities. This is a new venture for us, we have written a couple of tender bids in the past but they were very small ones. I have spent the last couple of months developing a new project that will hopefully meet the tender specification and allow us to expand into another area of Warwick. The bid has taken me quite some time to write but is now complete and ready to be sent off before the deadline on 31 October. It will be a bit strange to have more time for other things once it is sent, it has taken over my life somewhat and I just hope all the hard work will have been worth it and we get the contract. I am quite excited about the new project and I think it will ultimately be very beneficial for Warwick. In the meantime I have to go back to looking for funding sources and writing bids!
