The chair of Live at Home says it's hoped the Manx charity can be 'restructured' as it looks to cease its services at the end of the month.
The organisation has helped residents on the Island live independently in their own homes for almost 27 years.
A letter to members says, due to financial reasons, services will stop on 28 August.
David Gawne MBE says the ability to raise funds has reduced since Covid, whilst demand on services has increased.
'This is indeed a very sad day for us.' - David Gawne MBE, Chair of Live at Home
He told Manx Radio's Sian Cowper why the charity has announced this move now.
This is indeed a very sad day for us. We have taken this decision with great reluctance, but we believe that by making this decision at this time, when we can fully meet all our financial obligations, we can have the opportunity of restructuring and moving forward with a core service, which is what we originally designed in 27 years ago, which will continue to support and help our members in the future. In terms of the financial reasons that you mentioned, is it something that's been building gradually over time, or is this something that's come up quite suddenly? If you look back to COVID, pre-COVID, we had built up quite a nice reserve, which we felt barely comfortable with, and that enabled us to get through COVID. If we hadn't had that reserve at that time, then obviously we wouldn't have survived. But since COVID, our ability to raise funds has reduced, and the demand on our services has increased considerably. If you look back to when we first started 27 years ago in St John's, serving St John's and Oxtail, we offered a fairly basic service, which was, sorry, befriending, offering lunch clubs, etc, and outings for our members. Since then, we've expanded quite considerably and introduced a lot of new services. Those new services do require a considerable infrastructure, and whilst we have had considerable and very generous support from the island people, from individuals, from corporates, from government, that has just become unsustainable in the current economic climate. Now, I understand the charity does employ some staff. What does this mean in terms of redundancies? Well, obviously, yes, we do employ them when we employ 10 South, and they will all get their full redundancy pay. They will all be paid everything that they're entitled to by way of holidays, salary, redundancy. So that is all covered. We have enough money to do that and to cover everything else that we owe. And hopefully, we'll have a little bit left over at the end of the day. So what we're looking to do now moving forward is to restructure, and have an organisation where the costs, the annual running costs, will come down to something in the region of £140,000, of which we already have pledges to support us of £20,000, which leads us to raise £120,000. We know from our existing fundraising activities that we can probably raise in the region of £90,000 a year. With a government grant of £30,000, that will enable us to balance the books. What we need now and what we will be doing in the next week is going out with a public appeal to raise between £60,000 and £100,000 in order to complete our reserves. This is what you might in business terms call working capital, which means that we will be able to go forward. But without that sort of money behind us, we would not be able to go forward. If you look at the costs at this level of £120,000, that equates to £5 per person per week of the numbers that we support. There are £500 of them, which we will hopefully keep supporting going forward, and £5 a week per person to reduce loneliness and isolation is not a great deal of money. I feel sure that the great man's public will support us in this, and this is what we need to keep going is to raise at least £60,000, preferably £100,000 within the next couple of months. And then we can restructure. Hopefully we can re-employ some of our existing staff, but obviously in different roles. So I'm hopeful that this will not be the end. Now, what advice would you give to those who currently use live-at-home services? I'm sure there will be some who will be hearing this news and be worried about the impact it will have on them. Yes, indeed. You're absolutely right. They can contact us on 627-778 or 616-571. And we have made arrangements with the well-being partnerships, which exist across the island. And in our letter to members, we have given them their telephone numbers to contact them, to see what additional support they can offer. We're also talking obviously to our fellow charities, again, to see what assistance can be made available. So we are doing our best to support people, but as I say, the crux of what we're trying to do is to raise £6,200,000 in the next two or three months in order to provide a reduced call service. Thank you for making it to the end of the Manx Radio newscast. You are obviously someone with exquisite taste. May I politely suggest you might want to subscribe to this and a wide range of Manx Radio podcasts at your favourite podcast provider, so our best bits will magically appear on your smartphone. Thank you. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
