Greetings from Hope!
Burne Jones (Hope)
As Christmas approaches we would like to say a huge thank you to all our supporters over the last year, many of whom will have received their new copy of the Newsletter through the post – you can read it online HERE.
The newsletter features client stories, fundraising, and some facts about the number of people who come here and get support from Hope. Our bigger annual report will be published later this week after our board meeting this week.
Our supporters include a lot of members of the public. Hope is quite unusual in that the bulk of its income is derived from ordinary citizens and community groups. This includes faith groups, schools, community associations and businesses(especially their empoylees), which are both local and national or even multi-national, but who have a presence in the town or county. We get almost no grants from local or national government (around 0.75% of our income). Its YOU who funds Hope: local people. In turn, we help you: local people.
Hope is an example of local community projects which act to mitigate growing inequality and poverty in our society of which homelessness is the most abject example. Its self-help, a form of insurance, against the potential that your life might break down, or that of your children, friends or parents. People perhaps don’t count on government to bail them out anymore, with a possible awareness that system has largely broken down. Instead, recognising they are on their own, people invest in projects like Hope to provide a safety net of sorts. This investment includes financial donations, donations of goods, and donations of time through volunteering.
The challenge of providing that safety net, given the dramatically increasing scale of poverty and wider need we have seen this last year, is an immense burden for us, but also for you. Working with you is a form of social contract: we need your support, without it we cannot help you. Lets hope that in the next year we can continue to offer that little bit of Hope to people left out of society, our local pert of the national 1.5 million who are destitute or the wider 14m who are in poverty. Over Christmas we will do so explicitly, with Hope, and with your fantastic backing. In saying this I also says thanks to all Hope’s staff, volunteers, donors and trustees: Thank you.