In 2019, specialist insurance company Ecclesiastical launched a new funding campaign for charities around the UK – The Movement For Good Awards.
The campaign saw £1,000,000 in funds made available for charities across the UK, with 98,000 members of the public voting for their chosen cause, and 7,000 charities nominated for an award. 500 of those charities were selected, at random, for a £1,000 gift.
This year, in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, Ecclesiastical is running the campaign again. During May, charities were nominated by their supporters, with awards being made in early June and further rounds of funding planned for later in the year.
We are so pleased to say that Home-Start is one of the charities selected for an award.
Fundraising for charities is a complex business, especially in the current climate where opportunities to raise money by running events and community initiatives has been significantly reduced. At Home-Start, our funding comes from a number of different sources and we have been pleased to see significant success from bids made to Trusts and Foundations and some of our local Parish and District Council funds. Sometimes, however, funding from these sources is linked directly to specific activities or projects that we are delivering and cannot be used to support the charity as a whole.
Things like paying staff wages, office costs, telephone bills and transport costs can all fall outside the remit of funding from these bodies, leaving the base costs of the charity unfunded, and our management team with a big headache!
Awards from campaigns like the Movement For Good are a blessing for charities. The funding is what we call “unrestricted,” which means that we can put it towards our staff costs, or setting up one of our members of staff with a work laptop to help with working from home during the lockdown. Or, it might be put towards paying the rent on our offices, so that we have somewhere to go back to, once the lockdown is over.
We are so grateful to our supporters for nominating us for the Movement For Good awards, and to Ecclesiastical for running the campaign.
If you’d like to know more about our fundraising activities, you can sign up to our newsletter by emailing admin@hsrsc.org.uk, or maybe you’d like to get involved with a fundraising activity? You can do this via our Virgin Money Giving page here.
