News / Funding ‘a battlefield’ for local charities vying for dwindling pots of money
CHARITIES in Shetland are being forced to battle each other in an “absolute free-for-all” for dwindling pots of external funding.
Mental health charity Mind Your Head and Shetland Bereavement Support Service – both of which are free to the public – have said they face a constant fight to get enough money to run their services.
And Ellen Hughson of Shetland Bereavement said funding was “becoming a battlefield” for third sector organisations.
It comes as both charities spoke to Shetland News about the support they are providing to Shetlanders affected by a number of deaths by suicide over the last year.
‘Just come and ask’: Charities plea for anyone struggling to seek help
Mind Your Head’s chief executive Anouska Civico has worked in the voluntary sector since the age of 18, and says she has “never known it as tough as it is now” to secure funding.
“The difficulty with finances is stability,” she said.
“We’ve had staff members whose contracts would end at the end of February, and we’ve only just been able to renew them.”
Some of those contracts were only renewed because of a mammoth fundraising effort by Jonathan Raymond, who has raised over £100,000 to be split between three local charities.
Mind Your Head and Shetland Bereavement are two of those to benefit, and Civico said his incredible donation has “made a massive difference”.
“He’s practically going to be running one of our services for the year. That’s phenomenal,” she added.
For Shetland Bereavement, it means even more. Hughson said a third of £100,000 would “run our service for a whole year”.
“That is amazing to us,” she said.
Both charities rely on donations, fundraising and external funding to provide free support every year.
They say Raymond’s contribution is immensely welcome, but know that sort of income boost will not come along very often.
“Every year it’s a constant, ‘where are we going to get money from?’” Hughson said.
“You might get funding for one part of your service, but then not another part of your service.
“We had to put our service on hold for a while because we weren’t getting any funding bids coming back.
“They were saying to us, ‘your bid is great but we only have this small pot and we’ve had 30 people applying’.
“It’s becoming a battlefield.”
Civico agreed, saying there was previously an “unwritten rule” in Shetland that certain charities went for the same pots of money each year.
Now, however, she said: “We’re all competing against each other – it’s an absolute free-for-all.”
It is also “much smaller pots” of money that charities are fighting for, Hughson said.
And she added: “It feels like you have to spend so much time and energy fighting for the little money you do get.”
“We struggle to get donations in,” the Shetland Bereavement Service project co-ordinator said.
“People appreciate the service and then go away feeling better.
“But it’s a very confidential, private thing for them – they don’t go out shouting about it.”
Hughson said it felt likely people did not want to do a public fundraiser for them because that would then publicise that they had been seeking help for their grief.
“For some people that’s not an issue but for a lot of people it maybe is,” she added.
Mind Your Head has received several donations in recent months because of the increased publicity around its work, particularly after each suicide death.
Civico said she often wondered if the number of donations they had received, and the coverage coming their way, would stop people from giving them money.
“You hope it doesn’t stop it because we need it,” she said.
“We’ve had a lot of money donated, so I think people’s perception is we have a lot of money. We don’t.
“I think people probably look at us and go, ‘gosh, they’re always getting money’.
“Yeah, but we’re always spending it – it goes back into the community.”
Shetland Football Association recently donated £400 to the charity as a tribute to former footballers Iain Goodlad and Jonni Manson, both of whom died last year.
And Civico said she would “love to be able to say we don’t need that cheque”.
“Ultimately we would love to say that none of us need to sit around this table, we would love to say our services aren’t needed,” she told Shetland News.
“The reality is we do.”
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