Finances
In 2007 the trustees of Turnaround set themselves the target of tripling the finance available for its work to date by securing an income of £120,000 a year. This remains our objective. Madness given the current economic recession? Here are the reasons why.
The project began with a bid in April 2000 for £50,000 a year from a government fund managed by the Rough Sleepers Unit to support new ideas on dealing with homelessness. The grant was to cover rent and a salaried manager with volunteers from the homeless and ex-homeless community meeting the other staffing needs. The other bids to the fund were from long established charities drawn up on a fully salaried basis and higher by factors of two or three.
Our proposal was radical in proposing to draw upon skills, energies and commitment from homeless and ex-homeless people. It was to be bottom up rather than top down and a demonstration that they were not all feckless, idle and useless but could contribute much of value and worth to society if encouraged and supported to do so.
We were awarded exactly half the amount of the bid and even that only perhaps because the project had the personal support of the then,unfortunately now deceased Cabinet Minister, Mo Mowlem. Our grant amounted to less than the annual salary of a Higher Executive Officer in the Civil Service. It was far lower than any of the grants given to the other bidders. Yet, with it, we were supposed to supply a service week in, week out, all year round. We imagined that we would receive adequate funding in years to come when our results proved the worth of our labours. Not so. In February 2007 we were notified that the grant would rise from £30,000 to £40,000 (still £10,000 less than our opening bid). But added to the good news was the following: `this will bring our grant support for this project to a close.’ Despite our requests we have never been supplied with a reason why.
Given that in 2005 - five years after the foundation of Turnaround - based on the ideals of activity empowers people rather than lethargy, the then ODPM committed £90 million to a HCIP (HOSTELS CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT PROGRAMME) which was designed primarily to ensure that “The hostel must be a place of change for its residents.” Why couldn’t they continue to support the charity? We are now getting feedback from our clients/users that although the facilities provided as a result of the HCIP are in place in hostels the access to them are limited due to the running costs. WE PROVIDE 40 HOURS PER WEEK AND HAVE HELPED OVER 900 PEOPLE SINCE THE CENTRE OPENED AT A COST OF LESS THAN .01% OF WHAT THE GOVERNMENT SPENT ON HCIP !
Since April 2001, the project has served its target community five days a week for nine hours a day and 50 weeks of the year. It has achieved all the outcomes specified for it by the government and more. We calculate that some 900 people will have passed through our doors by 31 March this year. We have assisted on average twelve people back into work each year some after years of continuous unemployment and helped many others into housing or training or by way of advice.
The volunteers have created everything within the project apart from furniture, equipment and supplies: the computer network, the accounts and registry system, the policy documents, the application for charity status (granted within seven days of its receipt by the Charity Commission), the publicity and this website.
With the announcement of the end of government grant we considered closing. The Tudor Trust which knew of and respected our work came to the rescue with a grant to replace it. Also, after representations on our behalf from John Biggs, the London Assembly member for East London, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets came to see in our work in operation and made an emergency one year grant which, for the first time, raised our income above the £50,000 we had sought eight years before.
The price of our low level of funding has been constant worry about stability and continuity and at times it has been hard to see a way forward. Those who have worked with the project since the start are resolved that it cannot return to earlier days. We began with an impossibly low financial base and succeeded despite it. The need for the service has been proven by the record of continuous demand and client and volunteer achievement and this success deserves an adequate level of funding. A few simple calculations show that the savings we have generated for the public purse exceed many times over the support we have received from it.
The charity needs the finance to (1) pay wages however modest to retain staff in key positions or replace them when they leave to advance themselves; (2) assist clients with grants either for training or to assist them into work even if it is only paying for their fares to interviews and fares to work until they receive their first wage; and (3) provide client events and outings because we know these can give a dramatic boost to morale and are sometimes the pivotal point in reversing a downward spiral and converting it to an upward one.
Though the level of finance sought by the trustees will still be lower than that available to other bodies working with our client group it will be a great step forward. We will complete ten years of service on 31 March 2011 and then we can surely say that Turnaround has more than justified the late Mo Molem's belief that there is talent and constructive energy among the homeless and ex-homeless that should not be written off or deprived of the chance to prove itself. But then she never lost the common touch or her humanity and she wasn't in the business of writing whole classes of people off till kingdom come.