Supporting Good Causes – We Make Vital Decisions

Primary objective - help our Community

We need to help the Charities and Good Causes needing our support.  Changes in our private lives can force us to take stock of where we are.  We have to review our budget and prioritise our spending.  Our Club is no different. 

The trigger was the receipt in March of requests from charities experiencing dramatic loss of income because of Covid19.  We expected many more requests as the situation worsened.  We needed a strategy on how to respond.  We couldn’t donate all our money now and have none left for the later requests.

New Ways

But this was just when Covid19 meant we could no longer meet face-to-face.  We needed a way to meet that complied with ‘social distancing’.  After researching possible video-conferencing tools, we adopted Zoom and held our first virtual meeting, on March 30, when Members wanted to identify the organisations we have regularly supported (including regular Soapbox Derby beneficiaries) so we could continue funding them AND still have funds for appeals arising later.

Urgent Needs

Treasurer Michael Ginn produced and distributed an analysis of how much money was available now, and past donations.

The first decision was to agree the immediate donations we needed to make to respond to the appeals received so far, so that, despite the virus, we are still able to  do good in the world.

Three Categories

We analysed Michael Ginn’s report, and created a hierarchy to decide the beneficiaries and agreed the most needy recipients:

• First: Self-funding donations with their own dedicated income source.  These include ORBIS (President’s walk), Mary’s Meals (lunch raffle), End Polio (Charter lunch collection) and St Luke’s (Christmas meal collection)
• Second: Regular community support. These are donations to community activities such as Billericay in Bloom, Christmas Lights, Remembrance Day wreath, and the Lake Meadows photo competition.
• Third: Causes deserving regular support, including Aquabox, KidsOut, Hospices (St. Luke’s, Little Havens), Rotary Foundation and End Polio Now.

Our Budget

Our three main fund-raisers are the Christmas Raffle, the Billericay Fun Walk and our 100 Club, and we would supplement this from the Soapbox Derby Charity Funds over five years.

This agreed budget was approved on April 20 and allows us to plan our future support.  Over 40 percent is earmarked for the most needy as above, leaving a majority for responding to appeals/disasters and for donations to charitable demands which arise over time.