covid19

Resilience Fund: HARV and disAbility Cornwall & Isles of Scilly

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On 3rd April 2020 The Rank Foundation launched the Resilience Fund in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Applications are open to all RankNet members, and the fund has been implemented to cover cashflow, fundraising and loss of income challenges relating to the current covid-19 related climate. This includes those facing significant, unplanned demand on services. Within hours of opening, applications were received and the Grants Manager and Foundation Executives began processing the applications, assessing management accounts and cash flow forecasts, knowing that access to this type of funding was a priority.

We will be looking at some of the Resilience Fund grantees each fortnight, with this week spotlighting Hyndburn and Ribble Valley Domestic Violence and disAbility Cornwall & Isles of Scilly.

Hyndburn and Ribble Valley Domestic Violence (HARV)

Organisation Overview:

HARV first came to Rank’s attention in 2019 as a 3 year Major Grant recipient.

HARV’s aim is to identify, support, protect and empower both adults and children who are or have experienced abuse, exploitation and/or violence. Their services include an advocacy service, holistic support, safe houses and housing advice, a children and young people’s service, stalking and harassment services, legal advice and counselling.

Difficulties due to Coronavirus:

During the pandemic there has been a significant increase in demand for their services. Service users are currently accessing services in the evenings and weekends, and safety advice can only be given out over the phone and via email instead of face to face. The need for emotional support has grown significantly, as well as calls for accommodation support, thus the demand on the staff at HARV has increased.

For the majority of victims of domestic abuse, COVID has meant they have had to suffer at the hands of the perpetrator. The numbers of women murdered has increased, as well as abuse of children.

What will the Resilience Fund grant be used for?

“We are preparing for a tsunami of referrals once lock down restrictions are lifted. We are currently working hard to get our centre re opened and re stocked with essential items for families.”

Due to the significantly higher rates of domestic violence, the number of staff will need to increase to meet demand. Current staff are overwhelmed and exhausted. They are also fighting to transfer some of their services from face-to-face to digital, whilst running increased opening hours.

Their new centre was only opened in December 2019 in preparation to rent out conference space, host events and provide catering for income generation. All has been on hold since March 2020.

A resilience grant of £20,000 was approved for core funding. 

disAbility Cornwall & Isles of Scilly

Organisation Overview:

disAbility Cornwall & Isles of Scilly has been known to Rank since 2011 when they first recieved a 3 year Major Grant. Since then, they have benefited from 3 Time to Shine leaders and other grant funding.

The charity is values based and user-led, and supports, represents, includes and empowers people living with a long term health condition or disability, along with their families are carers. As per their name, they operate in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly on the South West coast.

Difficulties due to Coronavirus:

Their advice line has seen a nearly 70% increase in demand, and with all staff moving to working from home or in the community they have needed. much like HARV, to increase their opening hours to cover demand.

The charity has been inundated with enquiries from service users around PPE and hygiene, and what to do if they or their carers became sick. It would seem the council had not been forthcoming with this information therefore the CEO at disAbility Cornwall has had to work directly with the council to ensure information was sent to Direct Payment recipients.

In addition to longer opening hours, in response to COVID-19 they have set up a community kitchen, delivering free meals to 350 vulnerable clients twice a week who are self-isolating.

What will the Resilience Fund grant be used for?

More than 50% of disAbility Cornwall & Isle of Scilly’s income for the next two years comes from contracts where a key output is to help disabled people back to work. The job market is flat and many will remain unemployed, despite their best efforts. Many of their clients will have to self-isolate for much longer than the general public.

Some of their services that generate funding have been put on hold: losing advertising income from their magazine, they can’t hire out their meeting spaces and are having to run their new community kitchen with help from local businesses and volunteers.

Therefore, a Resilience grant of £18,000 was approved to support the increase in demand as well as loss of immediate income.

If you are a member of RankNet and wish to apply for Resilience funding, please visit our Opportunities page on the online platform. If you have any RankNet related queries, please contact ranknet@rankfoundation.com.

Resilience Fund: Horatio’s Garden and DCFRP

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On 3rd April 2020 The Rank Foundation launched the Resilience Fund in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Applications are open to all RankNet members, and the fund has been implemented to cover cashflow, fundraising and loss of income challenges relating to the current covid-19 related climate. This includes those facing significant, unplanned demand on services. Within hours of opening, applications were received and the Grants Manager and Foundation Executives began processing the applications, assessing management accounts and cash flow forecasts, knowing that access to this type of funding was a priority.

We will be looking at some of the Resilience Fund grantees each fortnight, with this week spotlighting Horatio’s Garden and Devon and Cornwall Furniture Reuse Project.

Horatio’s Garden

Organisation Overview:

Horatio’s Garden creates and cares for beautiful gardens in NHS spinal injury centres. Once the gardens have been built the charity maintains them and organises activities to take place in the garden. A Head Gardener leads a team of dedicated volunteers who keep the garden looking beautiful, run rehabilitative garden and art therapy sessions, serve tea and cakes, and host food events and music concerts. The feeling of being free from the hospital means that longer-term patients can use the garden for things they can’t necessarily do on the ward.

Difficulties due to Coronavirus:

As a result of the lockdown, the charity has had to cancel all its Spring and Summer fundraising events which will lead to a loss of income in the region of £240,000. As a garden charity, Horatio’s Garden hold the majority of their fundraising events over these months when the gardens are at their most beautiful so a large proportion of their fundraising income is raised during these months.

What will the Resilience Fund grant be used for?

The uncertainty around how long the pandemic will last means Horatio’s Garden is not getting the exposure it would usually recieve. Therefore a grant of £20,000 towards new fundraising efforts has been awarded.

Devon and Cornwall Furniture Reuse Project

Organisation Overview:

Devon and Cornwall Furniture Reuse Project (DCFRP) help people in the local community to make their houses into homes. They help around 340 people per year who may be moving into a property after being homeless or moving home because of domestic violence. Many of their clients have been given properties with no carpets or curtains and haven’t received any help or advice.

The charity believes that every person should have a bed to sleep in and a sofa to sit on and every family should have a dining table.

As well as furniture, DCFRP provide advice via a free coffee and advice corner. They will help people to look for jobs and write their CV’s, and also help with applications for benefits and housing advice.

Difficulties due to Coronavirus:

“At the moment, and to be honest, we are trying to take it day by day and week by week. We are concentrating on what we can do to survive for now in the hopes that we will recover.”

The furniture shop has closed due to the Coronavirus pandemic, therefore this revenue stream has stopped. The only income they have is when Plymouth City Council rehome an individual or a family, but this is nowhere near enough income to pay salaries and cover rent. DCFRP are still donating furniture, but are unable to collect donated furniture due to social distancing and lockdown, therefore stocks are low.

What will the Resilience Fund grant be used for?

Bringing forward DCFRP’s Match Trading grant of £10,000 will help them to recover far quicker than the anticipated 6-12 months and will significantly decrease the likeliness of the charity closing its doors.

Covid19 Update – June 2020

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Nearly one-third of lower-paid employees have lost jobs or been furloughed, compared to less than one-in-ten top earners: in numerical terms that is around 7 million jobs overall. The Resolution Foundation reports ‘significant anxiety’ amongst those furloughed as to immediate and future prospects, especially as furloughing is likely to obscure or hide future job losses. On this we might not see a clear picture until the year end.

About one million under 25s hit the labour market for the first time each year, mostly in the third quarter, and it unlikely that we will see any significant economic recovery before then. Given the predicted degree of economic contraction, there is little doubt that the young will bear the heaviest burden of this post pandemic recovery. With an extra 600,000 young people likely to be added to existing unemployment figures in the coming year, the challenge for the young is likely to eclipse those experiences of 2008: we are mindful that Rank’s exemplar leadership programme, Time to Shine, emerged from the rubble of the financial crash nearly 12 years ago.

Why do we mention this? Because Rank’s long standing interest in challenging inequality, especially around issues of social mobility and the emphasis we have placed on encouraging and supporting a generation of young, enterprising leaders is not likely to disappear. We might frame it differently, but we sense the need for greater focus and to ensure that our resources are maximised to greater effect.

As an ‘engaged’ funder the Foundation has concentrated on meeting the needs of its 450 strong network of organisations: ‘RankNet’ has grown steadily over recent years. If you are funded by Rank, then, by definition, you are part of the network and, through this, you have access to a range of funds, activities and support.

Governed by an elected group of ‘social leaders’, working closely with the Rank executive, we have been operating two funds for the last 8 weeks: an Emergency Fund (for small capital or training needs) and the uncapped Resilience Fund, created for those in the network experiencing immediate shortfalls in planned income, especially around meeting cashflow needs. Both of these operate with a short turnaround – anything considered by the weekly Resilience Fund committee is paid a few days later.

Through both of these funds, we have made 107 grants and supported 88 organisations. What is interesting, especially regarding the Resilience Fund applications, is that the size of the respective ask has been relatively modest with an average request of around £16K, perhaps reflecting the respect and understanding gained through existing relationships?

We have also followed up with 15 of those organisations recently supported, to assess the immediate impact of our grant whilst trying to better understand the complexities and significance of their respective challenges, and how we might better help going forward. But there is no doubt as to the significance of the uncertainty felt amongst our RankNet leaders, where for some the real crunch might not be felt for another 6 – 12 months.

The Rank team has also been busy managing the wider needs of our network including supporting our various leaders (including those furloughed) as part of our Time to Shine (T2S) or Rank Aspire Programme (RAP) and the Leadership Award holders. Part of this is the decision to consider extending those on our current schemes, where applicable, not just because of the upheaval caused by the pandemic but mindful of the challenges of leaving these schemes at a time when new job opportunities will be severely limited.

Adapting quickly to ‘remote’ working has ensured that we have been able to continue with much of our routine support of the network including the management of our place-based and social enterprise programmes. Across the network, we have run nearly 60 ‘Zoom’ events for some 550 people since lockdown. We have been struck by how responsive our members have been, building on the strength of strong networks and a mutual understanding on how powerful collaboration and partnerships can be.

The coordinated effort to help feed the most impoverished and the most vulnerable in Dundee, has been led, for most part, by a Rank funded coalition. As we look across RankNet, we have been overwhelmed by stories of exceptional practice, of innovation and, above all, of strong, community centred leadership: this is what we see as ‘engaged philanthropy’ in action. But ‘food poverty’ is but one strand of many, from digital poverty to poverty of opportunity, especially regarding the young, where other issues around mental health and well-being will sharpen our focus over the coming months.

What next? Mindful that the dust is yet to settle, we will look to ensure that the Foundation is well set to meet these emerging challenges, deepening our understanding of the opportunities this engaged, focused approach can bring. But more than ever, Rank is willing to collaborate and share with our partners, both within and outside of our network and across the various sectors, as the challenge to ‘reset, recover, rebuild and renew’ begins.

Our Plymouth: Working Collaboratively During Covid19

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During the Coronavirus crisis, Our Plymouth has partnered with POP+, Together for Devon and Plymouth City Council to help with the Good Neighbours Scheme. The Good Neighbours Scheme is a space for volunteers, community groups and charities to come together and help some of Plymouth’s most vulnerable residents throughout this difficult time.

By Emma Ridley
Plymouth Project Officer

In total, 700 people have stepped forward to volunteer, however, the scheme currently has more volunteers than it does opportunities; this is something that is being mirrored throughout the country. And although this is really positive and a great position to be in, it also has its own frustrations.

People who have been offering to volunteer are being kept on a database. The elected councillor of the volunteer programme has been writing to them to thank them for their service and to also keep them in the loop, so they are aware of what is going on. If there are no available opportunities, they aren’t just being ignored, they receive regular updates and are notified if any positions become available.Our Plymouth volunteers are helping with a mixture of services, including Age UK, British Red Cross, as well as providing welfare checks and doing food deliveries. Other members of the Good Neighbours Scheme are doing prescription collections and deliveries. Organisations that usually work alone have come together with a collaborative approach, which has been really powerful in the city.Our Plymouth are now focusing on how they manage this moving forward; they are mindful that a lot of people currently volunteering will eventually return to their normal jobs. Martin Mills from Our Plymouth said: “We are hoping that when this pandemic comes to an end, there will be more citizens in the community who notice the positive impact of volunteering. People are starting to realise the benefits of their own happiness by doing something good for someone else.”The Covid-19 pandemic created some massive challenges for Our Plymouth, as well as many other organisations. However, because of the RISE Trade Up programme, they have had the opportunity to re-visit their business plan, which has allowed them to re-direct funds online to help with their volunteer programme. Martin said: “The RISE programme has made it easy for us to pivot, because we have been able to adapt our cash flow and business plan. We wouldn’t have been able to do this without the support of the Rank Foundation.”

Handling Covid19 – First Give

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Our second feature for ‘Handling Covid19’ is First Give, a fully-resourced secondary school programme that gets an entire year group of students engaging in social action. First Give received their first grant from Rank back in 2017 and their Director, Louisa Searle, is a School Leadership Award Fellow and member of the RankNet Leaders Action Group.

First Give exists to inspire young people to make a difference to the causes they care about. They do this through a fully resourced programme delivered in partnership in secondary schools. The charity has 7 full time staff and works with roughly 200 schools and 37,000 young people a year.

“Usually the team are busy going in and out of schools to work with teachers and young people – delivering assemblies, workshops and hosting our celebratory School Finals, held at each of our partner schools where students can win £1,000 for a chosen charity.

During this isolation period we spent the first two weeks of the lockdown supporting our schools and helping them as they transition into remote learning. We also developed and launched a new mini-programme: First Give – Helping From Home. This free three-lesson programme can be used by teachers but also by parents and young people. It’s linked to an online competition where each month young people have a chance to win £200 for a chosen charity through their remote or virtual social action.

Teachers and supporters have been incredibly enthusiastic during this difficult period – we are all trying to find ways in which to spread positivity and bring people together… young people need this more than ever.

The biggest challenge during this crisis has been shifting our mindset from this period being one of challenge to one of opportunity – there’s a lot that charities like First Give can do to support our beneficiaries in this time.”

Get in touch with First Give via info@myfirstgive.co.uk

For more information visit Fist Give’s website.

Follow First Give on Twitter at @FirstGiveUK

Handling Covid19 – Memory Matters

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During these unprecedented times we are shining the spotlight on grant holders who are still able to continue their service delivery. 

We approached Memory Matters, an organisation that enriches the lives of people affected by dementia. The Rank Foundation awarded the first grant to Memory Matters back in Summer 2018 as part of Plymouth Place Based funding. 

They have a team of 20 people, including 1 part-time Rank employee, who works as the Plymouth Project Officer, as well as 1 Time to Shine Leader and Kate Smith and Laura Walker, the CEO’s of Memory Matters. Last year, they welcomed 75,076 people through their doors, including organisations hiring their rooms for conferences, meetings and activity sessions, as well as customers enjoying food in the Café and people looking for advice and guidance in our Memory Matters Hub (dementia advice centre). In 2019, The Hub supported 278 families that have been affected by dementia.

“There’s no such thing as ‘normal’ in the Memory Matters world. No two days are ever the same. We run many different projects – Memory Matters Workshops  (these run every day all over Cornwall), we provide Training all over the UK (as well as regularly training nurses in large local hospitals – sometimes every week), Moments Café – an innovative social enterprise Café open to the public, Memory Matters Hub (our dementia advice centre) which is open 6 days a week above Moments Café, Memory Matters Inside (a weekly project that teaches prisoners how to provide dementia therapy to other prisoners), as well as scoping out new projects on the horizon; like the Memory Matters Fellowship  (enabling local communities to run dementia groups with our support every week). It’s usually pretty busy!

Since the 21st March, the world has changed a bit. Moments Café has closed, but not before the staff spent the week asking all our customers whether they would like us to keep in touch with them, which was tough to do and a financial worry. We have furloughed 10 staff members that worked in the Café. The team, however, are spending time supporting each other with weekly film nights, P.E with Joe Wicks exercises and daily zoom catch ups – a few of the team live alone so this contact is so vital for them and also very beneficial in keeping their spirits up. 

The rest of the team are busier than ever. The whole team are very creative, and our organisation is built on looking for the positives in everything we do. I guess when we work with people living with a life limiting disease, it’s important to make the best of every opportunity. The Memory Matters Workshop teams run 10 different dementia workshops a week, so they have approx. 70 people living with dementia to support. They are doing this by weekly phone calls and sending out weekly activity sheets to take part in at home. For those that can get online, we are running zoom sessions – these have been amazing, not only are they seeing their peers and gaining some activity to keep their brains exercised but they are learning new digital skills that means they can also connect with family members easier too. 

Our Dementia Advice Centre (Memory Matters Hub) – sees many people coming in off the street for advice – this provision hasn’t changed; it’s just not face to face anymore. We are also spending time catching up with those that came to see us in the last 6 months, to ensure they are well connected and have a weekly chat and signposting as required. We also run a Young Onset Group (YOG) and a Football Memory Café with Plymouth Argyle so there are a few more people to try and get online. This is no mean feat, trying to ensure that the systems are the easy to use, as there usually isn’t anyone else to help. Also, trying to access technology is difficult too. So, in total we are supporting approximately 130 people living with dementia and their carers. 

We are sending out a daily newsletter, which has been very well received and ensures that despite physical distance, we are still connected to those that are interested in what we do. We have received a great response from our service users and they really appreciate our daily contact. We have recently put together a quick 15-minute video to share with anyone who is going to volunteer for local councils. Many will not have training and a few hints and tips on how to communicate effectively with someone with memory loss may be helpful. 

This period is going to be tough for everyone, people running services, furloughed staff worried about how this will affect their lives and also those we support, locked at home when you don’t remember why. There will be some very difficult moments coming, we know that. All we can do is the best we can right now, with the information we’ve got. Social Entrepreneurs are agile beings, they shapeshift, are resilient and the team at Memory Matters are no different. With the amazing support from funders and friends in the business community we can only press forward, positively.”

Contact Emma Ridley – Communications Officer (also found on RankNet) for more information emma@memorymatterssw.co.uk.