Effects of Covid-19 on Local Charities
Since the arrival of Covid-19 into the UK, sales in our Charity Shops and General Donations to the charity have decreased and remain on a downward trend. It’s quite often a local charity that’s responsible for the large community projects or important services in the local community. Ours in this case is Public Access Defibrillators.
How has Covid 19 effected AEDdonate so far?
- Sales in both charity shops have decreased
- Donations of items to both shops have decreased
- Donations to donation banks have decreased
- Charity donation tin donations have decreased
- Cancellation of our weekly Charity Choir
- Cancellation of all Community Training Sessions
- Fundraising events have been postponed
- Tesco Funding has changed.
What will happen if we face a full UK lockdown?
Effectively the retail side of the charity would halt completely. We would have to close the doors to the public therefore we would not have any sales revenue coming into the charity. We would have empty buildings to pay for, utility bills to pay and of course staff costs. As a small charity we rely on our shops to help keep us going. We help to fund hundreds of defibrillators, batteries and pads and essentially keep the machines going when others can’t afford to. Without our shops we can’t do this. Our shops help to fund the team who answer the calls, assist with fundraising, we order the equipment and deal with the suppliers, we arrange the installations, we register the defibrillators and we care for them once they have been installed. We help to raise awareness of sudden cardiac arrest and the need for community defibrillators. We work to provide the best and ensure the money that is raised is spent on good quality equipment that is sustainable. We do all this to help save lives. Lives that can be saved if the right equipment is on hand in the right place at the right time and we do that because we care.
In terms of operational capacity, the office team would still fully operate from home. Office telephone lines can be diverted, and we have full access to everything we need. We are predicting that we will be very quiet, but this will give us some time to catch up with individual workloads and be available for any urgent site issues.
We are a small local charity and we have worked extremely hard over the past 6 years to get us to where we are today. We have over 1800 community assets out in the community and our focus is to be able to be there to support those in the future.
How you can help?
Whilst we’re stuck in these tough times please consider our Revive 5 scheme. For just £5 per month you can keep us running and get us through this crucial stage. You can sign up here!
Our shops are going to be offering a voucher scheme, you can purchase a voucher to be spent at another time.
If you can offer a home to one of our donation tins please, please shout up.
If you are local you might consider donating items for our shops, if we go into lock down we imagine there will be a lot of sorting and spring cleaning happening and we’d love your donations if you could save them for us.
If you can help us in anyway, please get in contact.
We really appreciate the kind words and support we get and look forward to things returning to normal when we come out of the other side. In the meantime, we want to wish everyone all the very best.